Papers by Xin Xin
Multilingual AMR Parsing with Noisy Knowledge Distillation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing is a broad-coverage semantic formalism that encodes the meaning of a sentence as a rooted, directed, and labeled graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing English parser to learn and improve multilingual AMR parsers . their results show that noisy input and precise output are key to successful distillation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art English-only parser on four different languages. |
Progra: Progress-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Function Calling (2026.findings-acl)
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Huacan Chai, Zijie Cao, Maolin Ran, Yingxuan Yang, Jianghao Lin, Xin Peng, Hairui Wang, Renjie Ding, Ziyu Wan, Muning Wen, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Fei Huang, Ying Wen
| 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. |
Extract and Edit: An Alternative to Back-Translation for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Back-translation has been used in previous approaches for unsupervised neural machine translation, but pseudo sentences are of low quality as translation errors accumulate during training. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to extract and edit real sentences from monolingual corpora and introduce a comparative translation loss to evaluate the translated target sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art translation systems across two benchmarks and two low-resource language pairs by more than 2 BLEU points. |
Visually Guided Generative Text-Layout Pre-training for Document Intelligence (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU) . Xu et al., 2020;; Gu e t al, 2021;; Appalaraju e al. 2022) |
| Approach: | They propose a visually guided generative text-layout pre-training method that optimizes hierarchical language and layout modeling objectives to generate interleaved text and layout sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process word-intensive documents of any length and achieves competitive performance over baselines on VDU tasks. |
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
CLEVR-Implicit: A Diagnostic Dataset for Implicit Reasoning in Referring Expression Comprehension (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained vision-language models perform well in cross-modal tasks, including referring expression comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enables VL models to reason with implicit text . they propose to use a dataset to align the text with objects in the images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance 37.94% on referring expression comprehension task. |
Towards Explainable Computerized Adaptive Testing with Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on minimizing the number of questions required to assess ability, lacking clear and reliable explanations for the question selection process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to enhance computer adaptive testing (CAT) by providing human-like interpretability and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-based CAT performs comparably or superior to traditional CAT methods in accuracy and significantly improves student trust and satisfaction. |
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhao, Pingjie Wang, Liudan Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Ya Zhang, Kun Sun, Xin Sun, Xin Zhou, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds. |
From Text Segmentation to Enhanced Representation Learning: A Novel Approach to Multi-Label Classification for Long Texts (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on pre-trained language models, which have a maximum input sequence length of 512 tokens, and therefore have 'input length limitation'. |
| Approach: | They propose a text segmentation algorithm which guarantees to produce the optimal segmentation to address the issue of input length limitation caused by PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both text and label representations on MLTC datasets, unraveling the intricate correlations between texts and labels. |
SILO-BENCH: A Scalable Environment for Evaluating Distributed Coordination in Multi-Agent LLM Systems (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhe Zhang, Feiran Liu, Yi Shan, Xinyi Huang, Xin Yang, Yueqi Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Wenyuan Jiang
| 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. |
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, but most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question translation data to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities by using mechanistic interpretability methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual alignment even with unannotated answers in English and a wide range of languages even with instruction-tuned LLMs. |
Sentence Matching with Syntax- and Semantics-Aware BERT (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence matching aims to determine the special relationship between two sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate syntactic and semantic information into BERT with sentence matching by using an implicit integration method that is less sensitive to the output structure information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on several sentence matching datasets. |
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
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Jingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li, Linlin Song, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Ruitong Liu, Xin Su, Zifei Shan
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, but the interpretabilty of these metrics has been neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based metric that describes four aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-corrections, under-correcties, and over-corrects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric reveals critical qualities and locates drawbacks of GEC systems. |
Neural Machine Translation with Contrastive Translation Memories (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that retrieval-augmented NMT model obtains substantial improvements over strong baselines in the benchmark dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented NMT model that is holistically similar to the source sentence while individually contrastive to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in the translation task. |
Steering Away from Refusal: A Black-box Jailbreak Method Based on First-Token Distribution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze black-box jailbreaks lack direct optimization signals to refine adversarial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-jailbreak attack method that selects effective jailbreak templates and iteratively optimizes adversarial suffixes by maximizing the KL divergence from the standard refusal distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate (ASR) on all tested open-source models and delivers over 94% ASR on GPT-4.1. |
Full-Step-DPO: Self-Supervised Preference Optimization with Step-wise Rewards for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve long-chain mathematical reasoning focus on the first erroneous step, but ignore all other steps and rely heavily on external signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a DPO framework that leverages step-wise rewards from the entire reasoning chain instead of optimizing only the first erroneous step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Assessing Multilingual Fairness in Pre-trained Multimodal Representations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained multimodal models have shown exceptional capabilities towards connecting images and natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose two new fairness notions for pre-trained multimodal models that consider language as the fairness recipient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be generalized to multilingualism by cross-lingual alignment . the results show that the models are individually fair across languages . |
Are U a Joke Master? Pun Generation via Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning towards a Humor LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Yang Chen, Chong Yang, Tu Hu, Xinhao Chen, Man Lan, Li Cai, Xinlin Zhuang, Xuan Lin, Xin Lu, Aimin Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing research has demonstrated that the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate humorous sentences is limited to producing 25 unique jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences by a Chinese Pun dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models on Chinese and English benchmark datasets. |
ScaleBox: Enabling High-Fidelity and Scalable Code Verification for Large Language Models (2026.acl-demo)
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Jiasheng Zheng, Xin Zheng, Boxi Cao, Pengbo Wang, Zhengzhao Ma, Qiming Zhu, Jiazhen Jiang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| 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. |
LibriVoxDeEn: A Corpus for German-to-English Speech Translation and German Speech Recognition (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a corpus of sentence-aligned triples of German audio, German text, and English translation is available for speech recognition . a large corpus is available to date for end-to-end speech translation based on parallel data . |
| Approach: | They present a corpus of sentence-aligned triples of German audio, German text, and English translation based on German audio books. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is the largest resource for German speech recognition and for end-to-end German-to English speech translation. |
Updating Large Language Models’ Memories with Time Constraints (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can modify their internal memory by incorporating the latest external knowledge, but in practical applications, outdated information may be inputted into LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage decoupling framework that separates the identification and computation of time constraints into a symbolic system and propose 'selective update' of internal memory based on time constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ChatGPT performance by 60% and improves state-of-the-art LLM GPT-4. |
Improving Factual Consistency for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Enhancement and Alignment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Boyang Xue, Weichao Wang, Hongru Wang, Fei Mi, Rui Wang, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pretrained language models generate inconsistent factual knowledge in many conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly introduces extended feedforward networks (FFNs) in Transformers to enhance factual knowledge expressions given the specific patterns of knowledge-grounded dialogue inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the factual expression capability of feedforward networks (FFNs) in knowledge-grounded dialogue systems by knowledge enhancement and alignment respectively. |
Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification (2025.acl-long)
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Chengwu Liu, Ye Yuan, Yichun Yin, Yan Xu, Xin Xu, Zaoyu Chen, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a step-aware formal verification framework Safe to address hallucinations in CoT prompting . they propose 'formal step' as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. |
Fusion meets Function: The Adaptive Selection-Generation Approach in Event Argument Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Event Argument Extraction is a critical subtask of Event Extraction, focused on identifying event arguments within text. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fusion Selection-Generation-Based Approach that merges selective and generative methods to enhance argument extraction accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the RAMS and WikiEvents, while preserving the unique characteristics of both methods. |
OIE@OIA: an Adaptable and Efficient Open Information Extraction Framework (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Different Open Information Extraction (OIE) tasks require different types of information. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt an OIE Graph to different OIE tasks with simple rules . they implement an end-to-end OIA generator and make it open-accessible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves new SOTA performance on three popular OIE tasks. |
ReFSQL: A Retrieval-Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Kun Zhang, Xiexiong Lin, Yuanzhuo Wang, Xin Zhang, Fei Sun, Cen Jianhe, Hexiang Tan, Xuhui Jiang, Huawei Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods that align natural language with SQL Language underestimate inherent structural characteristics of SQL and lead to structure errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-argument framework that aligns natural language with SQL Language and trains one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and robustness of text-to-SQL generation on five datasets. |
DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, they struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed and achieves 7.5% improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel. |
Decomposable Neural Paraphrase Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models learn to generate paraphrases by mapping a sequence to another, with each word processed and generated in a uniform way. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model that can learn and generate paraphrases at different levels of granularity in a disentangled way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive in-domain performance compared to state-of-the-art models and significantly better performance when adapting to a new domain. |
Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Visual-Language Pre-training (VLP) models are vulnerable to adversarial examples . previous studies have focused on improving adversariality of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a local shuffle and sample-based attack that randomly shufts one of the local image blocks and generates adversarial images and samples around them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms other advanced attacks on Large Vision-Language Models and outperformed previous attacks on Visual-Langue Pre-training models. |
Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Despite the advances in large language models, they still face difficulties with multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought to improve model accuracy by 5% over standard supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy by 5% over standard fine-tuning with a few codes modified. |
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Shuyue Guo, Linzheng Chai, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. |
| Approach: | They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models. |
Gradient-based Intra-attention Pruning on Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and slow in inference due to their large sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning method which combines pruning with knowledge distillation to yield highly effective models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other pruning methods in sparsity regimes while maintaining 93% 99% performance. |
Pierce the Mists, Greet the Sky: Decipher Knowledge Overshadowing via Knowledge Circuit Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by hallucinations, a particularly challenging variant, knowledge overshadowing, which can lead to erroneous outputs even with high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze and detect knowledge overshadowing by using knowledge circuit analysis to dissect the function of key components in the circuit and how attention pattern dynamics contribute to the phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the framework can detect and analyze knowledge overshadowing and improves on existing models. |
RE-Matching: A Fine-Grained Semantic Matching Method for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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Jun Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Xin Zhao, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Junzhe Wang, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot relation extraction lack explicit modeling of matching pattern . et al. (2018) show that our method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction . they decompose sentence-level similarity score into entity matching score and context matching score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed than state-of-the-art methods. |
Generation-Augmented and Embedding Fusion in Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event argument extraction is a crucial task that aims to extract arguments from the entire document, beyond sentence-level analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to document-level event argument extraction that integrates predefined templates and generative language models into a foundational embedding derived from a classification model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is more effective than baseline models and data-efficient in low-resource scenarios. |
The Art of Abstention: Selective Prediction and Error Regularization for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved the state-of-the-art results on many NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple error regularization trick that improves confidence estimation without substantially increasing the computation budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed regularization improves confidence estimation without increasing computation budget. |
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chaoyue He, Xin Zhou, Yi Wu, Xinjia Yu, Yan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Di Wang, Shengfei Lyu, Hong Xu, Wang Xiaoqiao, Wei Liu, Chunyan Miao
| Challenge: | ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks . |
| Outcome: | ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering. |
The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Role of Neutral Words in Language Model Group-Agnostic Debiasing (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Junlei Zhou, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, raising ethical concerns, especially about perpetuating stereotypes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates a neutral word semantics-based loss function to alleviate the deterioration of the LMS during debiasing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the deterioration of the Language Modeling Score (LMS) by incorporating a neutral word semantics-based loss function. |
DialogQAE: N-to-N Question Answer Pair Extraction from Customer Service Chatlog (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Xu Wang, Yufan Jiang, Mengliang Rao, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui
| 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. |
BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised defense methods rely on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised model of malicious behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects diverse attack types across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to baselines. |
Compressing Large-Scale Transformer-Based Models: A Case Study on BERT (2021.tacl-1)
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Prakhar Ganesh, Yao Chen, Xin Lou, Mohammad Ali Khan, Yin Yang, Hassan Sajjad, Preslav Nakov, Deming Chen, Marianne Winslett
| Challenge: | Popular pre-trained Transformers have improved performance for various NLP tasks by sizable margins, but are too resource-hungry and computation-intensive to suit low-capacity devices or applications with strict latency requirements. |
| Approach: | They present a literature review of the compression of Transformers, focusing on the popular BERT model, which has attracted considerable research attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve Sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, machine reading comprehension, question answering, text summarization, and other tasks by sizable margins. |
SecFormer: Fast and Accurate Privacy-Preserving Inference for Transformer Models via SMPC (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of cloud-based inference services are relying on SMPC to protect data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Privacy-Preserving Inference for Transformer models that eliminates exponential and maximum operations in PPI without sacrificing model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms MPCFormer in terms of performance and efficiency . it is 3.57 and 3.58 times faster than PUMA for BERTBASE and BERTLARGE . |
Exploring Diverse Expressions for Paraphrase Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural paraphrase generation methods focus on single paraphrases while ignoring the fact that diversity is essential for enhancing generalization capability and robustness of downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach with two discriminators and multiple generators to generate a variety of different paraphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gains significant diversity and improves quality over state-of-the-art datasets. |
BOLT: Fast Energy-based Controlled Text Generation with Tunable Biases (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Energy-based models (EBMs) have gained popularity for controlled text generation due to their high applicability to a wide range of constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model with tunable biases to adjust the language model’s output logits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains the generator’s autoregressive nature to assert a strong control on token-wise conditional dependencies and overall fluency, and converges faster. |
Decouple knowledge from paramters for plug-and-play language modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have made impressive results in a wide range of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training model with editable and scalable key-value memory and leverage knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples the knowledge storage from model parameters with an editable and scalable key-value memory and leverages knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. |
Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting temporal information from text are not suitable for time-sensitive questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing temporal information extraction systems to construct temporal graphs of events, times, and temporal relations in questions and documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms graph convolution-based approaches on SituatedQA and TimeQA. |
Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss . previous work builds an end-to-end system to learn to choose sentences without explicitly modeling document context . |
| Approach: | They propose three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document context in a self-supervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on a CNN/DM dataset. |
Cross Copy Network for Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of sequence-to-sequence models, dialogue logics are often ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a network architecture to explore the current dialog context and similar dialogue instances’ logical structure simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network architecture is superior to existing state-of-the-art models. |
MTSQL-R1: Towards Long-Horizon Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL via Agentic Training (2026.acl-long)
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Taicheng Guo, Hai Wang, Chaochun Liu, Mohsen Golalikhani, Xin Chen, Xiangliang Zhang, Chandan K. Reddy
| Challenge: | Existing systems for multi-turn Text-to-SQL are limited to a short-horizon paradigm, generating a query per turn without execution, explicit verification, and refinement, which leads to non-executable or incoherent outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an agentic training framework for long-horizon multi-turn Text-to-SQL that uses a Markov Decision Process to generate a query per turn without execution, explicit verification, and refinement. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on CoSQL and SParC show that MTSQL-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the importance of environment-driven verification and memory-guided refinement for conversational semantic parsing. |
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning. |
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Leon Derczynski, Xingjian Du, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Gv, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Jiaju Lin, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Johan Wind, Stanisław Woźniak, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
| 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. |
Multi-hop Graph Convolutional Network with High-order Chebyshev Approximation for Text Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing single-hop graph reasoning in Graph convolutional networks may miss some important non-consecutive dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional network with the high-order dynamic Chebyshev approximation which augments multi-hop graph reasoning by fusing messages aggregated from direct and long-term dependencies into one convolutionalist layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on four transductive and inductive NLP tasks and the ablation of the existing model. |
LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiajie Zhang, Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Wanjun Gu, Danqing Liu, Minhao Zou, Shulin Cao, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| 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. |
Bridging Subword Gaps in Pretrain-Finetune Paradigm for Natural Language Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to pretrain language models are limited by one-size-fits-all vocabulary . embeddings of mismatch tokens can be efficiently initialized in downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend pretrain-finetune pipeline with an embedding transfer step . plug-and-play embeddable generator is introduced to generate any input token . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows for more efficient and better performed NLG models. |
Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to calibrate language models are limited in inference-time efficiency or fail to provide informative signals. |
| Approach: | They propose an activation-based calibration method, ActCab, which trains a linear layer on top of the LM’s last-layer activations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on five popular QA benchmarks and reduces the average expected calibration error (ECE) score by up to 39%. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
Enhancing Pre-trained Models with Text Structure Knowledge for Question Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing question generation models treat input passage as a sequence-to-sequence generative task, but they are not aware of text structure. |
| Approach: | They propose to model text structure as answer position and syntactic dependency and propose a mask attention mechanism to make syntaktic structure of input passage accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the strong pre-trained model ProphetNet on a SQuAD dataset and achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art model. |
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become prevalent for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization algorithm that introduces a modulating factor that down-weighs misranked preference pairs and employs focusing strategy that adapts over the course of training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DynamicFocalPO surpasses both DPO and FocalPO on benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using Mistral-Base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B. |
LAFaCT: Attribution-based Localization and Focused Sequential Analysis of Fact-Critical Tokens for Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from hallucinations, severely undermining their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that localizes fact-critical tokens and performs sequential analysis on their hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework localizes fact-critical tokens using Factual Criticality . it then performs a focused sequential analysis on their hidden states . |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Reveal and Release: Iterative LLM Unlearning with Self-generated Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to unlearning large language models assume full access to the forget dataset, overlooking two key challenges: (1) Forget data is often privacy-sensitive, rare, or legally regulated, making it expensive or impractical to obtain (2) The distribution of available forget data may not align with how that information is represented within the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a “Reveal-and-Release” method to unlearn with self-generated data, prompting the model to reveal what it knows using optimized instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method removes the influence of undesirable data from the model. |
Rethinking Sample Polarity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) positive and negative self-generated rollouts are used to update the model's policy . positive samples sharpen existing correct reasoning patterns, while negative samples encourage exploration of new reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates advantage signals to key tokens across different polarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the ability of large reasoning models to learn from their own generated rollouts. |
On the Benefits of Learning to Route in Mixture-of-Experts Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) models allow us to scale up model sizes while keeping the amount of compute time fixed. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a router to route inputs to experts in a layer to scale up model sizes while keeping the amount of compute time fixed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales up with the help of a router that routes input tokens to experts in a layer and shows that it is more efficient than a non-trainable router. |
IM^2: an Interpretable and Multi-category Integrated Metric Framework for Automatic Dialogue Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation metrics for dialogue systems are expensive and time-consuming . current evaluation metrics focus on a single quality or several qualities . |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable, multi-faceted, and controllable framework to combine dialogue metrics which are good at measuring different qualities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates a large number of evaluation metrics to improve the performance of the model. |
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Sun, null Ymyang, Xinyi Jiang, Yu Tian, Junnan Zhu, Jiang Zhong, Qin Lei, Jingwang Huang, Haoyang Zeng, Xinyu Zhou, Xin Xiao, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis. |
How to Train a Real-World Silicon Concierge? Internalizing Complex Business Workflow to Only OneModel (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Traditional industrial agents rely on modular workflows that fracture into a labyrinth of ad-hoc patches, leading to cascading errors and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift from external workflows to internalized knowledge representation that consolidates complex business logic and SOPs directly into the model’s parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the impossible triangle of latency, accuracy, and complexity. |
The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become the dominant paradigm for building knowledge-intensive language systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sigmoidal scaling law that shows that retrieval quality determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while retaining the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL. |
LMTurk: Few-Shot Learners as Crowdsourcing Workers in a Language-Model-as-a-Service Framework (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs) are effective few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that treats few-shotlearners as crowdsourcing workers . they propose to use these workers to train models that solve a task well . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach treats few-shotlearners as crowdsourcing workers . the resulting annotations can be utilized to train models that solve the task well . |
RMoA: Optimizing Mixture-of-Agents through Diversity Maximization and Residual Compensation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems based on large language models are limited by high computational overhead, information loss, and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a Residual Mixture-of-Agents (RMoA) that integrates residual connections to optimize efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks of alignment, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and multitasking understanding, while significantly reducing computational overhead. |
Label Effects: Shared Heuristic Reliance in Trust Assessment by Humans and LLM-as-a-Judge (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators . et al., 2024: strong labels can foster trust but also undermine it . |
| Approach: | They show that LLMs' source labels bias trust judgments by humans . they use eye-tracking data to analyze LLM internal states during judgment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is biased by disclosed source labels, the authors show . eye-tracking data show humans rely heavily on source labels for judgments . |
OCR-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are limited by text-context budgets, resulting in token-expensive storage of raw trajectories . Optical Context Retrieval Memory (OCR-Memory) renders historical tra-jectorios into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the visual modality as a high-density representation of agent experience. |
| Outcome: | Optical Context Retrieval Memory (OCRM) renders historical trajectories into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. |
Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM agents struggle with identifying bugs in the Linux kernel . bugs can affect billions of users, affecting the Linux Foundation's research on the topic . |
| Approach: | They propose a LinuxFLBench benchmark to measure the accuracy of LLM agents on the Linux kernel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves FL accuracy with minimal costs. |
RepoDistill: Distilling Repository Knowledge through Compression-Aware Budget Allocation and Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have strong performance on code translation tasks, but they struggle with repository-level scenarios where context is extensive and interdependent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval with learning budget allocation for fine-grained context compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on SWE-QA, CoderEval, and LongCodeU. |
Learning Better Internal Structure of Words for Sequence Labeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a gap exists between methods for learning representations of sentences and words . authors propose a convolutional neural architecture with no down-sampling for learning words based on character embeddings . |
| Approach: | They propose a funnel-shaped wide convolutional neural architecture with no down-sampling for learning words' internal structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other character embedding models on six sequence labeling datasets. |
GMH: A General Multi-hop Reasoning Model for KG Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs are incomplete with many facts missing, causing performance bottlenecks in many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general multi-hop reasoning task that can be formulated as a search process and can be extended to long-distance reasoning scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in short and long distance reasoning scenarios. |
How Pre-trained Language Models Capture Factual Knowledge? A Causal-Inspired Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Li, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Zhenhua Dong, Chengjie Sun, Bingquan Liu, Zhenzhou Ji, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as ”Dante was born in [MASK]” . |
| Approach: | They propose to quantitatively measure and evaluate the word-level patterns that PLMs depend on to generate the missing factual words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fills in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts by relying on effective clues or shortcut patterns. |
Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-hop reasoning assume that every relation has enough triples for training . however, performance drops significantly on few-shot relations . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method that learns meta parameters from high-frequency relations that could quickly adapt to few-shot scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot scenarios on two public datasets from Freebase and NELL. |
Continual Learning Long Short Term Memory (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prevent catastrophic forgetting in neural networks are based on the stability-plasticity dilemma, but only a limited size of old data is available. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual Learning Long Short Term Memory cell in Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that considers the state of each individual task's output gates and the correlation of the states between tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on spoken language understanding tasks over state-of-the-art approaches. |
SURE: Mutually Visible Objects and Self-generated Candidate Labels For Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Joint relation extraction models face high computational complexity, complex network architectures, difficult parameter tuning and limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They develop a candidate label marker mechanism that prioritizes strategic label selection over simple label generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed candidate label marks improve the SOTA methods by 2.5%, 1.9%, 1.2% . the proposed candidate labels improve the performance of the proposed methods . |
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving inference framework called MixPi which aims to obfuscate a user's private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods on token and sentence classification tasks. |
Task-oriented Domain-specific Meta-Embedding for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods neglect domain-specific knowledge and use the same word embedding for each word in all domain-specified datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate domain-specific and task-oriented information into meta-embeddings by combining pre-trained word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on four text classification datasets and shows that it is compatible with existing methods. |
ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching (2026.findings-acl)
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Han Zhu, Wei Kang, Liyong Guo, Zengwei Yao, Fangjun Kuang, Weiji Zhuang, Zhaoqing Li, Zhifeng Han, Dong Zhang, Xin Zhang, Xingchen Song, Lingxuan Ye, Long Lin, Daniel Povey
| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models for dialogue generation suffer from high latency and stability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) zero-shot spoken dialogue generation model based on flow-matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in speech generation due to poor speech intelligibility and turn-taking precision. |
Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems have difficulties adapting to unseen domains . end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven task-oriented dialogue system that extracts dialogue context information into a natural language query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. |
G-MAP: General Memory-Augmented Pre-trained Language Model for Domain Tasks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) models tend to forget the general knowledge acquired by general PLMs, leading to catastrophic forgetting and sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory built from the frozen general PLM without losing the general knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory built from the frozen general PLM without losing the general knowledge. |
mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer (2023.acl-long)
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Guanhua Chen, Lu Hou, Yun Chen, Wenliang Dai, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual vision-language pretrained models are biased towards English due to the lack of sufficient non-English image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a retrieval-efficient dual-stream multilingual VLP model by aligning CLIP model and a multilingual text encoder through a novel Triangle Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation method. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that mCLIP achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot and finetuned multilingual image-text retrieval tasks. |
Automating Android Build Repair: Bridging the Reasoning-Execution Gap in LLM Agents with Domain-Specific Tools (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be useful for building applications, but their use for fixing Android build errors remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-level language model agent with domain-specific tools for inspecting and manipulating the Gradle build environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms a state-of-the-art coding agent that relies on a general-purpose shell significantly on 184 build errors. |
Stock Embeddings Acquired from News Articles and Price History, and an Application to Portfolio Optimization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that news articles can be leveraged to improve price prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to encode the influence of news articles through a vector representation of stocks . they use a deep learning framework to acquire the vector representation using news articles and price history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to other financial problems besides price prediction. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
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 . |
Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding (2023.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of understanding multi-modal content, but textonly human-computer interaction is not sufficient for many application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-to-text generation task and a multi-modal framework that bootstraps cross-modal training from frozen pre-trained visual & audio encoders and frozen LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can understand both visual and auditory content in video and generate meaningful responses grounded in the visual and audio information presented in the videos. |
Hypoformer: Hybrid Decomposition Transformer for Edge-friendly Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress Transformer are limited to sub-components, e.g., selfattention networks or embedding layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid Tensor-Train decomposition which retains full rank and meanwhile reduces operations and parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms light-weight SOTA methods on three translation tasks and achieves 7.1 points absolute improvement in BLEU and 1.27 X speedup on IWSLT’14 De-En task. |
RepoAgent: An LLM-Powered Open-Source Framework for Repository-level Code Documentation Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Qinyu Luo, Yining Ye, Shihao Liang, Zhong Zhang, Yujia Qin, Yaxi Lu, Yesai Wu, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yingli Zhang, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Xia et al., 2018) demonstrate that a large language model can generate and maintain high-quality code documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model powered open-source framework for generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality documentation for the entire project. |
CODE-MVP: Learning to Represent Source Code from Multiple Views with Contrastive Pre-Training (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on code representation learning, which aims to represent the semantics of source code into distributed vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate different views with the natural-language description of source code into a unified framework with Multi-View contrastive Pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three downstream tasks over five datasets. |
Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. |
CLICKER: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing via In-Context Learning with Adaptive Stepwise Reasoning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods are static and fail to propagate edits across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a KE method that dynamically retrieves only knowledge relevant to a given query and edits it to maintain cross-lingual consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms static KE methods on a multilingual dataset with semantically similar but irrelevant prompts. |
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. |
Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing (2025.acl-long)
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Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve applying preference learning to step-wise solution pairs, but they overlook critical subtle errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference learning framework that injects predefined subtle errors into pivotal tokens to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework improves on Qwen2-7B-Instruct and MATH with 4.5K training samples. |
Generative Text-to-Image Retrieval via Hierarchical Identifiers and Semantic Internalization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image retrieval methods suffer from limited semantic discriminability, alignment bias, and closed-set restrictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for semantic internalization for Generative Multimodal Alignment . they construct multi-granularity hierarchical identifiers to ensure unique, semantically consistent image representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on Flickr30K and MS-COCO datasets . it achieves average Recall@1, Recall @5, and Recall_10 improvements of 10.65%, 8.50%, and 7.00% . |
Multimodal Graph Transformer for Multimodal Question Answering (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a myriad of complex tasks require both prior knowledge and reasoning intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play quasi-attention mechanism to integrate multimodal graph information to vanilla self-attention as effective prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform reasoning across multiple modalities. |
VeriFact: Enhancing Long-Form Factuality Evaluation with Refined Fact Extraction and Reference Facts (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focuses on accuracy and precision, but factuality evaluation is difficult due to inter-sentence dependencies. |
| Approach: | They introduce a factuality evaluation framework to enhance fact extraction . they also introduce 'factRBench' that evaluates both precision and recall . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances fact extraction by identifying incomplete and missing facts . it also evaluates precision and recall in long-form models, whereas prior work focuses on precision. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
MINER: Multi-Interest Matching Network for News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods learn a single user embedding from user’s historical behaviors to represent the reading interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a poly attention scheme to learn multiple interest vectors for each user, which encodes the different aspects of user interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the MIND news recommendation benchmark. |
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their capabilities in cryptographic decryption tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
LiteVL: Efficient Video-Language Learning with Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Modeling (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale video-language pre-trained models have shown appealing performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-text model that adapts a pre-trained image-language model into a text-based model without heavy pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on video-text retrieval and video question answering tasks without heavy pre-training. |
CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing certified robustness methods for certifying input-specific text perturbations have shown promise in certifyling UTPs, but masking only adversarial words can eliminate the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to certify a language model’s robustness against UTPs by using random smoothing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high certified accuracy under extensive masking and achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. |
LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN (2026.findings-acl)
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Sijie Wang, Kai Zhao, Wee Peng Tay, Shuo Zhang, Chengwen Liu, Quanjiang Guo, Ren Junhao, Xin Li, Heng Lian, Jingdi Lei, Rui She, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. |
F2RL: Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning Framework for Claim-Guided Evidence-Supported Counterspeech Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating evidence-supported counterspeech lack clear guidance with a core claim for organizing evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning framework for generating claim-guided and evidence-supported counterspeech (F2RL) they generate counter-claims based on hate speech and design a self-evaluation mechanism to select the most appropriate one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves excellent performance on three benchmark datasets with strong factuality and faithfulness. |
Executing Natural Language-Described Algorithms with Large Language Models: An Investigation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, creating new SOTAs and reaching human-level language understanding performance on a series of tasks and benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an algorithm test set sourced from Introduction to Algorithm to assess LLMs' code execution abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can execute programs described in natural language as long as no heavy numeric computation is involved. |
Unlocking Human-Like Visible Logic: How Logic Diagrams Boost Logic Reasoning in Large Language Models? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but they struggle with formal logical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate visual logic diagrams into LLMs’ reasoning workflows to enhance their performance on formal logic tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on syllogistic and conditional reasoning with programmatically generated Venn, Euler, and Linear diagrams. |
Unlocking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Language Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are important in low-resource language (LRL) Neural Machine Translation (NMT) but their practical effectiveness varies significantly across different languages. |
| Approach: | They evaluated the performance of 8 parameters-efficient fine-tuning methods with 15 architectures using the SacreBLEU score. |
| Outcome: | The Houlsby+Inversion adapter outperforms the baseline architectures in both in-domain and out-domain tests and the Houlson+Inverter achieves the best performance overall. |
AQE: Argument Quadruplet Extraction via a Quad-Tagging Augmented Generative Approach (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining involves multiple subtasks, but each one is insufficient for understanding argumentative structure and reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a quadruplet extraction task that extracts four argumentative components . they use a generative quadragging module to augment the training of the generative framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extract arguments from a large-scale dataset. |
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. |
A Robust Self-Learning Framework for Cross-Lingual Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pretrained contextual representation models have made significant progress on a number of different English NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust framework to include unlabeled non-English samples in the fine-tuning process of pretrained multilingual representation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework includes unlabeled non-English samples in the fine-tuning process of pretrained multilingual representation models. |
MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Fanyi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Haoyu Liu, Xixin Cao, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| 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. |
A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs de-emphasize temporal correlations between facts sequences and ignore inferring clues from missing facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal PAth-based reasoning model that is robust to ambiguous temporal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task. |
Diffusion-NAT: Self-Prompting Discrete Diffusion for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-text generation methods are unable to generate coherent and fluent texts due to discrete nature of text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate discrete diffusion models (DDM) into NAR text-to-text generation and integrate BART to improve the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing methods and surpasses autoregressive methods on 7 datasets. |
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Automated synthesis of zeolite holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly expedite automated synthesis of zeolites owing to its machine readability. |
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself . |
From Text to Emoji: How PEFT-Driven Personality Manipulation Unleashes the Emoji Potential in LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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Navya Jain, Zekun Wu, Cristian Enrique Munoz Villalobos, Airlie Hilliard, Xin Guan, Adriano Koshiyama, Emre Kazim, Philip Colin Treleaven
| Challenge: | Methods like prompt-based In-Context Knowledge Editing and gradient-based Model Editor Networks (MEND) show irregularity and variability; IKE depends on the prompt, leading to variability and sensitivity; MEND yields inconsistent and gibberish outputs. |
| Approach: | They employ Opinion QA Based Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to manipulate the Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that they are more accurate than prompt-based IKE and gradient-based MEND outputs. |
NESTFUL: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Nested Sequences of API Calls (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kinjal Basu, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kiran Kate, Mayank Agarwal, Maxwell Crouse, Yara Rizk, Kelsey Bradford, Asim Munawar, Sadhana Kumaravel, Saurabh Goyal, Xin Wang, Luis A. Lastras, Pavan Kapanipathi
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and datasets for tool calling have lagged behind . nested sequencing is a common problem in LLMs, but it is not enough to evaluate them. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e. sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a full sequence match accuracy of 28% and a win-rate of 60% on nested sequences of API calls. |
ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, research on complex chart understanding tasks is limited . a pipeline for visual reasoning datasets addresses these limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a code-driven pipeline for generating visual reasoning datasets . pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation to retrieve professional chart templates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality through model-based evaluation. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Hierarchical Modeling of Global Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Document-level machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to the difficulty in efficiently using document context. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical model to learn document context for document-level neural machine translation . they use a sentence encoder to capture intra-sentence dependencies and a document encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance over strong baselines. |
Self-Supervised Dialogue Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems have failed to capture the order of utterances in coherent dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning task to capture the flow of dialogues . they propose 'inconsistent order detection' task to predict whether utterance is ordered or misordered . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be applied to open-domain and task-oriented dialogue scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the OpenSubtitiles and Movie-Ticket Booking datasets. |
A Benchmark for Translations Across Styles and Language Variants (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | lack of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks has hindered progress in this field . lack of evaluation benchmarking has hinder MT's ability to generate accurate outputs . |
| Approach: | They evaluate translations across semantic preservation, cultural and regional specificity, expression style, and fluency at both the word and sentence levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is validated on translations of state-of-the-art large language models . |
Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yizhe Xiong, Xiansheng Chen, Xin Ye, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Haoran Lian, Zhenpeng Su, Wei Huang, Jianwei Niu, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that the test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept of Temporal Scaling Law to study test loss of LLMs . they break down test loss into fine-grained token positions and develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the test loss of LLMs as the training steps scale up. |
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. |
StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a directive, client-centered counseling approach for eliciting clients' motivation for behavioral change. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation . therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate fluent dialogues with minimal intervention time and a high level of evaluation. |
SpecEdit: A Spectral Approach for Multi-Round Knowledge Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-round knowledge editing suffers from performance degradation as edits accumulate . intrinsic knowledge of model and historical edit memories are naively coupled during editing . SpecEdit improves model editing performance by reducing destructive coupling . |
| Approach: | They propose a spectral-based model editing module that integrates into existing editing methods without altering their original optimization procedures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on multiple LLMs and editing methods. |
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | CKnowEdit is the first-ever knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese knowledge editing dataset to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset highlights the challenges that LLMs face in mastering Chinese . CKnowEdit can correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Chinese, the authors show . |
Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that contrastive learning improves pre-trained language models to derive high-quality sentence representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to punish false negatives and generate noise-based negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves pre-trained language models while pushing apart irrelevant negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Neuron Activation Differential Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on optimizing external components of CoT, but lack internal explanations for the quality of the model's outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient method to identify reasoning-critical neurons by analyzing their activation patterns under reasoning chains of varying quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that neurons in the feed-forward layers are critical in the generation of high-quality reasoning chains. |
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Bingxiang He, Zhong Zhuang, Jia Deng, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. |
Extending Phrase Grounding with Pronouns in Visual Dialogues (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional phrase grounding aims to localize noun phrases mentioned in a caption to their corresponding image regions. |
| Approach: | They extend the task by considering pronouns to include noun phrases and pronounos . they construct a dataset of phrase grounding with noun and pronom phrases to image regions . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that pronouns are easier to ground than noun phrases . a baseline model with coreference information can significantly boost the grounding performance . |
Retrieve, Discriminate and Rewrite: A Simple and Effective Framework for Obtaining Affective Response in Retrieval-Based Chatbots (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-based chatbots has low-quality affect response . Existing frameworks for obtaining affective response are based on Retrieve-and-Rerank . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based framework which provides affective response for retrieval chatbots by using a new discriminate-and-rewrite mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines and can guarantee the quality of the response and satisfy the affect label. |
ProofInfer: Generating Proof via Iterative Hierarchical Inference (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing proof generation models focus on generating several proof paths instead of a whole tree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates the proof tree via iterative hierarchical inference . they propose coding the proof as plain text without losing structure information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed proof generation model significantly improves performance on widely-used datasets. |
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Liyu Zhang, Wei Fan, Jiaxin Bai, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Conceptualization is a fundamental element of human cognition and plays a pivotal role in generalizable reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized. |
| Outcome: | The proposed categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized . |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
ClusterFormer: Neural Clustering Attention for Efficient and Effective Transformer (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing sparse attention methods use fixed patterns to select words without considering similarities between words. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural clustering method which integrates into the Self-Attention Mechanism in Transformer and integrates it into the target task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms two typical sparse attention methods on translation, text classification, and text matching tasks while having a comparable or even better time and memory efficiency. |
LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text . |
Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from object hallucinations, i.e., they tend to generate objects inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate powerful large vision-language models (LVLMs) they propose a polling-based query method to evaluate object hallucination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can evaluate object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. |
Tracing the Roots of Facts in Multilingual Language Models: Independent, Shared, and Transferred Knowledge (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using low-resource languages, multilingual language models (ML-LMs) have been developed to transfer factual knowledge across languages. |
| Approach: | They ask how ML-LMs acquire and represent factual knowledge . they use a multilingual factual information probing dataset to investigate ML . |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight the challenge of maintaining consistency factual knowledge across languages. |
Adjusting the Precision-Recall Trade-Off with Align-and-Predict Decoding for Grammatical Error Correction (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Modern writing assistance applications always contain a Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) model to correct errors in user-entered sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective approach to Align-and-Predict Decoding for most popular sequence-to-sequence models to offer more flexibility for the precision-recall trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used in both English and Chinese GEC models and achieve state-of-the-art results. |
PokeMQA: Programmable knowledge editing for Multi-hop Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering (MQA) is one of the challenging tasks to evaluate machine’s comprehension and reasoning abilities, where large language models (LLMs) have widely achieved the human-comparable performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to edit multi-hop question models to update model with up-to-date facts while avoiding expensive re-training or fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms all competitors in multi-hop question answering tasks and consistently produces reliable reasoning process. |
Modeling Temporal-Modal Entity Graph for Procedural Multimodal Machine Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Procedural Multimodal Documents organize textual instructions and corresponding images step by step. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel temporal-modal entity Graph for comprehending PMDs . they propose encoding and reasoning modules to capture textual and visual entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture textual and visual entities and trace their temporal-modal evolution. |
When Inverse Data Outperforms: Exploring the Pitfalls of Mixed Data in Multi-Stage Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for o1-level performance focus on unidirectional supervised fine-tuning (SFT), overlooking the intricate interplay between diverse reasoning patterns. |
| Approach: | They construct a reverse reasoning dataset and examine how it is supervised . they find that naively mixing forward and reverse data during SFT weakens the directional distinction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy by 1.6%–6.8% over a standard model. |
AgenticEval: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing static safety evaluation methods are ill-equipped to address dynamic nature of AI risks and evolving regulations, creating a critical safety gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm of agentic safety evaluation reframing evaluation as a continuous and self-evolving process rather than a one-time audit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a consistent decline in model safety as the evaluation hardens. |
Dependency Position Encoding for Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation extraction from sentence are limited in focusing on leveraging dependency information. |
| Approach: | They propose dependency position encoding (DPE) that incorporates dependency connections and dependency types into the self-attention mechanism to distinguish the importance of different word dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the previous methods on SemEval 2010 Task 8, KBP37, and TACRED. |
Mitigate Extrinsic Social Bias in Pre-trained Language Models via Continuous Prompts Adjustment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of extrinsic bias mitigation rely on manual word lists for sensitive groups . however, these word lists are limited by length and scope, resulting in poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates continuous token lists from the entire vocabulary space and uses them to bridge the gap between outputs and targets in fairness learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three NLU tasks. |
CPL: Counterfactual Prompt Learning for Vision and Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xuehai He, Diji Yang, Weixi Feng, Tsu-Jui Fu, Arjun Akula, Varun Jampani, Pradyumna Narayana, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods tend to learn spurious or entangled representations, leading to poor generalization to unseen concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning technique that tunes the learnable prompt for pre-trained vision and language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves few-shot performance on vision and language tasks over existing prompt tuning methods. |
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. |
GMFL: Efficient Global Masking for Federated LLM Fine-tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent solution to mitigate the communication and computation costs in federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play layer freezing mechanism to integrate with existing federated fine-tuning frameworks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces communication overhead and lowers computational costs while preserving the performance of the underlying federated fine-tuning methods. |
MTRec: Multi-Task Learning over BERT for News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods learn news representations solely based on news titles. Existing methods only utilize title information and neglect other valuable news information such as categories and entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task method to incorporate multi-field information into BERT, which improves its news encoding capability. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the MIND news recommendation benchmark show the proposed method is effective. |
Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capability across languages and covers high-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (2024.acl-long)
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Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Multipanel images are a common form of visual representations, and humans can achieve approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that tests multipanel visual reasoning models with 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that challenge state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) human users can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions, compared with previous benchmarks. |
What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT builds an external datastore, which saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily pruned according to local correctness, and it is more explainable. |
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems with opaque architectures are limiting deep search capabilities for web-augmented large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transparent and modular multi-agent framework to democratize deep search for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source systems in deep reasoning tasks. |
Improving Knowledge Graph Embedding Using Affine Transformations of Entities Corresponding to Each Relation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods use k-dimensional vectors to represent each entity in a knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use affine transformations to embed knowledge graphs using previous methods . they propose to add k additional variables to the existing methods to perform embedding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms RotatE, Distmult and ComplEx on various data sets. |
DAWN-ICL: Strategic Planning of Problem-solving Trajectories for Zero-Shot In-Context Learning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to conduct in-context learning without using human-annotated demonstrations are unreliable and lead to error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to conduct in-context learning without using human-annotated demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods using human-annotated demonstrations. |
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)
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Jun Zhan, Junqi Dai, Jiasheng Ye, Yunhua Zhou, Dong Zhang, Zhigeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Linyang Li, Hang Yan, Jie Fu, Tao Gui, Tianxiang Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms. |
SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Tong, Weidong Zhang, Jiaang Li, Haibin Chen, Shilei Liu, Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Yujin Yuan, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which lack content-aware, fine-grained noise detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing pipelines on benchmarks and is 2.5x faster at inference. |
E-ConvRec: A Large-Scale Conversational Recommendation Dataset for E-Commerce Customer Service (2022.lrec-1)
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Meihuizi Jia, Ruixue Liu, Peiying Wang, Yang Song, Zexi Xi, Haobin Li, Xin Shen, Meng Chen, Jinhui Pang, Xiaodong He
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing conversational recommendation system (CRS), which provides valuable recommendations to users through conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct an authentic Chinese dialogue dataset consisting of over 25k dialogues and 770k utterances, which contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. |
Causality-Guided Multi-Memory Interaction Network for Multivariate Stock Price Movement Prediction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for stock price movement prediction use auxiliary data, but we assume other stocks should be utilized as auxiliary information to enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Causality-guided multi-memory interaction network for stock movement prediction which transforms basic attention into Causal Attention by calculating transfer entropy between multivariate stocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets from the U.S. and Chinese markets. |
StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experiments conducted on three types of structured data show that StructGPT greatly improves the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative Reading-then-Reasoning framework to solve question answering tasks based on structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the reasoning ability of large language models over structured data under the few-shot and zero-shot settings. |
Pioneering Reliable Assessment in Text-to-Image Knowledge Editing: Leveraging a Fine-Grained Dataset and an Innovative Criterion (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image models encode factual knowledge into their parameters, but they may become obsolete over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for T2I knowledge editing that integrates paraphrase and multi-object test to enable more fine-grained assessment on knowledge generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing models and improves their performance. |
How to Ask Good Questions? Try to Leverage Paraphrases (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-like questions rely on paraphrases to generate good questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate paraphrase knowledge into question generation to generate human-like questions by combining paraphrases with a back-translation method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves obvious performance gain over several strong baselines and human evaluation validates that it can ask questions of high quality by leveraging paraphrase knowledge. |
EDTC: A Corpus for Discourse-Level Topic Chain Parsing (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Discourse analysis is a fundamental part of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-level topic chain parsing system which can be automated . they propose lexical cohesion modeling instead of lexically measuring topic structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is robust and reliable, and can provide high reliability and low confidence scores. |
Structured Pruning for Efficient Generative Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are limited in their deployment in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune the feed-forward networks of generative pre-trained language models to smaller widths without designing extra operators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.51x/6.96x inference speedup on GPU/CPU with 67% size reduction. |
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
Unveiling the Flaws: Exploring Imperfections in Synthetic Data and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | acquiring large amounts of high-quality data can be challenging due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reverses instruction-following issues caused by uniform format of synthetic data and proposes unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reverses instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. |
HyperCL: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Embedding with Hierarchical Ontology (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies neglect the ontology of knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings and suffer from the dominance issue of facts over ontologies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hyper-relational KG embeddings that captures the hierarchical ontology and a concept-aware contrastive loss to alleviate the dominance issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three real-world datasets and shows that it can integrate with other embedding methods and improve link prediction performance. |
Beyond Generation: Leveraging LLM Creativity to Overcome Label Bias in Classification (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate label bias by leveraging in-domain data are often unavailable in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration method that generates synthetic in-domain data from a few in-context demonstrations and utilizes it for calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces label bias by leveraging in-domain data from demonstrations. |
LFKQG: A Controlled Generation Framework with Local Fine-tuning for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing KBQG models focus on the most relevant part of the answer entity, while neglecting the rest of the subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled generation framework for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases that generates questions with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) predicates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods significantly on three widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion, PathQuestions, and WebQuestIONS. |
WirelessMathBench: A Mathematical Modeling Benchmark for LLMs in Wireless Communications (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results across a broad array of tasks, yet their capacity for complex, domain-specific mathematical reasoning remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models on mathematical modeling challenges to wireless communications engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs on mathematical modeling challenges to wireless communications engineering. |
When Efficiency Becomes a Vulnerability: Computational Cost Attacks on WebAgents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing WebAgents suffer from computational cost attacks due to long reasoning processes and excessive computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adversarial prompts and a reinforcement learning-enhanced selector to identify the most effective perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits large language models to generate diverse adversarial prompts and a reinforcement learning–enhanced selector to identify the most effective perturbations. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
Masks Can be Learned as an Alternative to Experts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that sparse activation techniques can reduce inference performance without sacrificing performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to sparsify a pre-trained dense large language model into a mixture-of-experts architecture for faster inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is more efficient than one-shot sparsification techniques . it achieves 97% performance retention on downstream tasks with only 50% of parameters activated . |
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Ping Nie, Yiwen Guo, Haojie Wei, Zhanqiu Zhang, Pasquale Minervini, Ruotian Ma, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, but internal mechanisms that contribute to RAG’s effectiveness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and examine their ability to improve RAG by examining expert activations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods. |
Enhancing Ethical Explanations of Large Language Models through Iterative Symbolic Refinement (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on the application and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) but LLMs are still prone to factual errors and inconsistencies in their explanations, offering limited control and interpretability for inference in complex domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an abductive-deductive framework that integrates Large Language Models with an external backward-chaining solver to refine step-wise natural language explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves explanations generated via in-context learning methods and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) on ethical NLI tasks while producing formal proofs describing and supporting models’ reasoning. |
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. |
JointCoder: Exploring Automated ICD Coding on Real-World Chinese EHRs with a Multi-Agent Framework (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated ICD coding systems face several fundamental challenges due to the limited availability of publicly available Chinese ICD datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese ICD coding dataset and a multi-agent framework to reformulate ICD as a joint disease-procedure coding task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world Chinese ICD coding datasets and 1.7B-parameter models. |
UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation Models (2026.acl-demo)
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Qundong Shi, Jie Zhou, Biyuan Lin, Junbo Cui, Guoyang Zeng, Yixuan Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Xin Liu, Zhen Luo, Yudong Wang, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for audio foundation models are heavily reliant on English, making it difficult to objectively assess models’ performance on Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that supports 10 languages, 14 task categories, 24 models, and 36 benchmarks with one-command evaluation and real-time leaderboards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports 10 languages, 14 task categories, 24 models, and 36 benchmarks with one-command evaluation and real-time leaderboards. |
Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for full-attention dLLMs rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on mathematical and coding benchmarks. |
An Iterative Emotion Interaction Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a task that aims to recognize the emotion of each utterance in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative emotion interaction network which uses iterativly predicted emotion labels instead of gold emotion labels to explicitly model the emotion interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method retains state-of-the-art performance on two datasets and achieves high accuracy. |
Can Language Models Capture Human Writing Preferences for Domain-Specific Text Summarization? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies employ large language models as auxiliary tools for humancentered NLP. |
| Approach: | They construct a model to capture human writing preferences by fine-tuning pre-trained models with data and designing prompts to optimize the output of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures human writing preferences through the dimensions of length, content depth, tone & style, and summary format. |
Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion and Key Attribute Tree Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA EM models on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets. |
Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | citation graphs can be used to extract scientific papers under different conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity unsupervised summarization model that fine tunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a public benchmark dataset. |
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Question Answering Forums (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspects-based sentiment analysis focus on a single opinionated sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to combine aspects and their sentiments for QA forums . they use cross-sentence aspect-opinion interaction modeling to align the aspect mentioned in the question and associated opinion clues in the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three real-world datasets. |
A Table-to-Text Framework with Heterogeneous Multidominance Attention and Self-Evaluated Multi-Pass Deliberation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Table-to-text works have been widely applied in different domains, such as weather forecast and financial report generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-to-text approach on top of Self-evaluated multi-pass Generation and Heterogenous Multidominance Attention to explore the hierarchical structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several SOTA methods quantitatively and qualitatively on three public datasets. |
Generative Psycho-Lexical Approach for Constructing Value Systems in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised concerns regarding their intrinsic values. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychologically grounded five-factor value system for Large Language Models that integrates psychological principles with cutting-edge AI priorities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed value system meets standard psychological criteria, improves LLM safety prediction, and enhances Llm alignment, when compared to the canonical Schwartz’s values. |
Compression of Generative Pre-trained Language Models via Quantization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress generative pre-trained language models fail on generative tasks due to homogeneous word embeddings and limited memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level contrastive distillation method to learn distinguishable word embeddings and a module-wise dynamic scaling method to make quantizers adaptive to different modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art compression methods on generative PLMs by a clear margin. |
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. |
Once Upon a Time in Graph: Relative-Time Pretraining for Complex Temporal Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on strengthening the knowledge-time association between text and time-stamps, but this is insufficient for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that explicitly connects all temporally-scoped facts by modeling the time relations between any two sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline T5 on multiple temporal question answering datasets . it is especially good at modeling long-range complex temporal dependencies, the authors say . |
Intent-Aware and Hate-Mitigating Counterspeech Generation via Dual-Discriminator Guided LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Hate speech is an aggressive expression that incites hatred towards specific groups based on their group identity. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLMs-based framework for counterspeech generation that uses intent-aware discriminators to decode intents of LLM models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches intents with hate mitigation intents and performs well. |
MusKGC: A Flexible Multi-source Knowledge Enhancement Framework for Open-World Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Open-world knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer novel facts by enriching existing graphs with external knowledge sources while maintaining semantic consistency under the open-world assumption (OWA). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source knowledge enhancement framework based on an open-world assumption (OWA) that integrates external knowledge sources and a new evaluation strategy to validate new facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance across benchmarks and the evaluation strategy effectively assesses new facts under OWA. |
IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Haodong Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yichuan Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive services across various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy by comparing their models to a set of benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 3,538 examples across nine tasks covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. |
Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval (DR) methods first encode texts into a dense embedding space and then conduct text retrieval using efficient nearest neighbor search. |
| Approach: | They propose Momentum adversarial Domain Invariant Representation learning to train a domain classifier that distinguishes source versus target domains and adversarially updates the DR encoder to learn domain invariant representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on 10+ ranking datasets collected in the BEIR benchmark in the zero-shot setting, with more than 10% relative gains on datasets with enough sensitivity for DR models’ evaluation. |
Counteracting the Matthew Effect in Self-Improvement of LVLMs through Head-Tail Re-balancing (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Guo, Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Yitao Zhai, Xiaowei Shi, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large vision language models have impressive reasoning capabilities across complex multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use distribution-reshaping and trajectory-rebalancing to improve visual reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL2.5-4B models show that their methods outperform baselines by 3.86 points. |
Not The End of Story: An Evaluation of ChatGPT-Driven Vulnerability Description Mappings (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data proves that ChatGPT performs no less than humans in text generation and knowledge Q&A. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ChatGPT to map vulnerabilities to common weakness enumeration (CWE), common attack pattern ennumeration and classification (ATT&CK) techniques and other classifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than human experts on many tasks, but it can't replace professional security engineers in vulnerability analysis. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
Consistent Autoformalization for Constructing Mathematical Libraries (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoformalization is the task of automatically translating mathematical content written in natural language to a formal language expression. |
| Approach: | They propose to use three mechanisms to improve autoformalization quality . they propose to combine most-similar retrieval augmented generation, denoising steps and auto-correction with syntax error feedback to improve syntactic, terminological and semantic control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanisms can deliver syntactically, terminologically and semantically more consistent results across different models. |
SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing TOD datasets present simplified interactions with simple slot-value style constraints and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel TOD dataset that captures complex user requirements using SQL statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset captures complex, real-world user requirements. |
KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to design the interaction strategy between large language models and knowledge graphs (KGs) are not effective for large language model (LLM)s to solve complex tasks due to the large volume and structured format of KG data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that enables small LLMs to actively make decisions over knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on in-domain and out-domain datasets using 10K samples. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
Controllable Contrastive Generation for Multilingual Biomedical Entity Linking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual biomedical entity linking (MBEL) aims to map language-specific mentions in biomedically text to standardized concepts in a multilingual knowledge base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based controllable contrastive generation framework for MBEL which summarizes multidimensional information of the UMLS concept mentioned in biomedical text into a natural sentence following a predefined template. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches against UMLS concepts in as many languages and types as possible, thus facilitating cross-information disambiguation. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current research on in-image machine translation focuses on synthetic data with simple background, single font, fixed text position, and bilingual translation. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to handle the challenge of practical conditions in PRIM . they annotate a real-world one-line text image with complex background, fonts, diverse text positions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation quality and visual effect compared to other models. |
Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (2024.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for solving dialogue state tracking (DST) with large language models through function calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. |
SRF: Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with a Novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction ignore bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module for relation prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance and the proposed method is effective and general when integrated into existing models. |
ViCor: Bridging Visual Understanding and Commonsense Reasoning with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) use pre-trained large language models and pre-training visionlanguage models. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative approach where pre-trained LLMs serve as problem classifiers to analyze problem category and either use VLMs to answer directly or actively instruct LLM to gather relevant visual elements to support potential commonsense inferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all other methods without in-domain fine-tuning on two VCR benchmark datasets. |
Anchor-based Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) require massive GPU memory due to their size and parameter count. |
| Approach: | They propose to use anchor-based self-attention network and anchor-basic inference strategy to compress sequence information into an anchor token, reducing the keys/values cache and enhancing inference efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the key/value cache and improves inference efficiency by 99% while maintaining similar accuracy levels. |
Taming LLMs with Gradient Grouping (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new study presents scaling with gradient grouping (SGG) the adaptive learning rate scaling approach is based on per-parameter statistics, which incurs memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimizer wrapper that improves adaptive learning rate estimation by dynamic grouping and group-specific scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves learning rate estimation on diverse models with different model sizes and batch sizes. |
L2C: Describing Visual Differences Needs Semantic Understanding of Individuals (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for captioning images without understanding individual's semantics are not effective . a new task, visual comparison, has drawn increasing attention in the field of language and vision . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-to-compare model which learns to understand semantic structures of two images and compares them while learning to describe each one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline and human evaluation on the Birds-to-Words dataset. |
Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)
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Xin Zheng, Jie Lou, Boxi Cao, Xueru Wen, Yuqiu Ji, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun
| 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. |
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. |
Coarse-to-fine Few-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Ruotian Ma, Zhang Lin, Xuanting Chen, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing few-shot NER solutions do not consider sub-class discrimination and various granularity of new classes during coarse training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a cluster-based prototype loss to learn group-wise discriminative representations of coarse-grained classes and a mixture prototype loss for learning the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows superior performance over baseline methods on in-domain and cross-domain settings with various target granularity. |
Parameter-Efficient Cross-lingual Transfer of Vision and Language Models via Translation-based Alignment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-lingual transfer methods that use labeled data and linguistic resources would consume excessive resources for a large number of languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient cross-lingual transfer learning framework that utilizes a translation-based alignment method to mitigate multilingual disparities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces disparities among languages and improves cross-lingual transfer results in low-resource scenarios while keeping and fine-tuning only a small number of parameters. |
Compete to Complete: Co-opetition Adversarial Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce hallucination in large language models lack a robust mechanism for generating a generative model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates retriever–generator training in RAG as a minimax game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval-augmented generation performance on seven benchmark datasets. |
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiajie Zhang, Zhongni Hou, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Zhenyu Hou, Yilin Niu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| 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. |
Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT uses pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines a pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing model on four benchmark datasets and is open-source. |
RepoGenesis: Benchmarking End-to-End Microservice Generation from Readme to Repository (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Ran Jia, Xu Chen, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated function/class-level generation, neglecting complete microservice repository generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark for repository-level end-to-end web microservice generation that reflects real-world development workflows. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared 106 repositories across 18 domains and 11 frameworks and 1,258 API endpoints and 2,335 test cases. |
Relation Discovery with Out-of-Relation Knowledge Base as Supervision (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relations from text corpus without annotated data are violated by up to 31%. |
| Approach: | They propose to use out-of-relation knowledge bases to supervise the discovery of unseen relations where relations to discover from the text corpus and those in knowledge bases are not overlapped. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art relation discovery performance by a large margin. |
ORBIT: Cost-Effective Dataset Curation for Large Language Model Domain Adaptation with an Astronomy Case Study (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | General-purpose models lack depth for expert-level tasks because of limited domain-specific information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for curating domain-specific datasets from noisy web sources to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on the astronomy benchmark and on the AstroBench. |
On the Human-level Performance of Visual Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Visual7W has been widely used in assessing multiple-choice visual question-answering systems. |
| Approach: | They replicated a human experiment on Visual7W to examine the human-level performance of VQA. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the better a model performs on Visual7W, the better it aligns with human-level intelligence. |
How to Stop an Avalanche? JoDeM: Joint Decision Making through Compare and Contrast for Dialog State Tracking (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing state-of-the-art models of dialog state tracking do not address avalanche phenomenon . well-known commercial dialog systems include the Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Microsoft Cortana. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog state tracking (DST) model which can tackle the avalanche phenomenon . they propose combining a jointly decision making method and a compare and contrast dialogue update technique . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and proves its validity. |
Learning to Stop: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Urban Vision-Language Navigation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models treat STOP as other actions, which leads to undesirable behaviors that the agent fails to stop at the destination. |
| Approach: | They propose a policy module that differentiates STOP from other actions . they propose 'learning to stop' module that can be used to train an agent to follow natural language instructions in real-world environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline on a challenging urban VLN dataset Touchdown by 6.89%. |
The Task Shield: Enforcing Task Alignment to Defend Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are becoming conversational assistants . indirect prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat to these systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel and orthogonal perspective that reframes agent security . they propose 'task shield' that verifies whether each instruction and tool call contributes to user objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense reduces attack success rates while maintaining high task utility on the AgentDojo benchmark. |
ConNER: Consistency Training for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing consistency training methods for named entity recognition (NER) are likely to violate the consistency hypothesis or focus on coarse-grain consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a consistency training framework for cross-lingual named entity recognition that leverages unlabeled target-language data and dropout-based consistency training on labeled source-language datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on translation-based consistency training on unlabeled target-language data and dropout-based consistent training on labeled source-language datasets. |
ComCLIP: Training-Free Compositional Image and Text Matching (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | erroneous semantics of individual entities are essentially confounders that cause the matching failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free compositional CLIP model which disentangles input images into subjects, objects, and action subimages and composes CLIP’s vision encoder and text encoder to perform evolving matching over compositional text embedding and subimage embeddments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mitigates spurious correlations introduced by the pretrained CLIP models and dynamically evaluates the importance of each component. |
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. |
Reasoning-Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models for Short Video Content Governance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Zixuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hongwei Wang, Baoyu Jing, Xiang Shen, Xin Dong, Zhuolin Hao, Hongyu Xiong, Yang Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying inappropriate content require extensive human-labeled data and lack cross-issue generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) pretraining paradigm for unified inappropriate content detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the MLLM's performance in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings and shows strong generalization capabilities to emergent, previously unseen issues. |
An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) are rehearsal-based and need to store samples and thus may encounter privacy and security issues. |
| Approach: | They propose an Ensemble-of-Experts framework for rehearsal-free continual relation extraction that discriminates between experts and augments analogous relations across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing rehearsal-free methods and is even better than existing methods. |
Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved satisfactory performance in counterfactual generation, however, there are misalignments between LLMs and humans which hinder LLM from handling complex tasks like relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose to mimic the episodic memory retrieval mechanism of human hippocampus to align LLMs’ generation process with that of humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing methods in terms of quality of counterfactuals. |
Light-R1: Curriculum SFT, DPO and RL for Long COT from Scratch and Beyond (2025.acl-industry)
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Liang Wen, Yunke Cai, Fenrui Xiao, Xin He, Qi An, Zhenyu Duan, Yimin Du, Junchen Liu, Tanglifu Tanglifu, Xiaowei Lv, Haosheng Zou, Yongchao Deng, Shousheng Jia, Xiangzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that opensource curriculum training is more effective when distinct datasets are available for different training stages. |
| Approach: | They propose an opensource suite for training long reasoning models using publicdata and models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1-DistillQwen-32B models in math reasoning. |
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Junjie Gao, Jiale Cheng, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Shuntian Yao, Dan Zhang, Jinhua Du, Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages. |
GhostBERT: Generate More Features with Cheap Operations for BERT (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that some parameters in pre-trained language models can be pruned away without severe accuracy degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates more features with very cheap operations from the remaining features and can be applied to unpruned BERT models to enhance their performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results on the GLUE benchmark on three backbone models (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa and ELECTRA) verify the efficacy of the proposed method. |
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. |
Combining Deep Learning and Topic Modeling for Review Understanding in Context-Aware Recommendation (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for user reviews are limited by data sparsity and lack of data. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LSTM and Topic Modeling to extract review information for recommender systems by utilizing user reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on Amazon review dataset and shows better ability on making topic clustering than traditional topic model based method. |
SalaMAnder: Shapley-based Mathematical Expression Attribution and Metric for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yue Xin, Chen Shen, Shaotian Yan, Xiaosong Yuan, Yaoming Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Chenxi Huang, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting improves the math reasoning capability of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for attribution of component-level contributions in CoT reasoning using Shapley value and a stratified sampling algorithm that significantly reduces computational complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computational complexity and provides robust correlations with model performance. |
DATA-CUBE: Data Curriculum for Instruction-based Sentence Representation Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve sentence representation learning (SRL) ignore the potential interference problems across tasks and instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction tuning method that arranges the order of multi- task data for training to minimize interference risks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost the performance of state-of-the-art methods. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| 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 . |
Enhancing Cross-lingual Prompting with Dual Prompt Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that prompting is superior for multilingual/cross-lingual problems . despite its effectiveness on English tasks, its potential for cross-lingual problem is under-explored . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompting that can be used to augment cross-lingual prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 46.54% with only 16 English training examples per class, significantly better than fine-tuning. |
DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Haoran Meng, Zheng Xin, Tianyu Liu, Zizhen Wang, He Feng, Binghuai Lin, Xuemin Zhao, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui
| 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 . |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
Domain-Specific NER via Retrieving Correlated Samples (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Successful Named Entity Recognition models fail on texts from some special domains, for example, Chinese addresses and e-commerce titles. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance NER models with correlated samples to help the text understanding . they draw correlated texts by the sparse BM25 retriever from large-scale in-domain unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NER models can be enhanced with correlated samples . the proposed model can be used to reason out the correct answer on hard cases . |
PlanGEN: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Planning and Reasoning Trajectories for Complex Problem Solving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mihir Parmar, Xin Liu, Palash Goyal, Yanfei Chen, Long Le, Swaroop Mishra, Hossein Mobahi, Jindong Gu, Zifeng Wang, Hootan Nakhost, Chitta Baral, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, Hamid Palangi
| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural planning lack constraint-guided iterative verification and adaptive selection . a recent study found that LLMs are not good at such planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference-time algorithms on NATURAL PLAN and OlympiadBench benchmarks. |
Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods (2026.acl-long)
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Chenfei Liao, Wensong Wang, Zichen Wen, Xu Zheng, Yiyu Wang, Haocong He, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Xin Zou, Yuqian Fu, Bin Ren, Linfeng Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
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. |
AuriSRec: Adversarial User Intention Learning in Sequential Recommendation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on capturing user implicit preferences from historical interactions and matching them with the next behavior, instead of predicting user explicit intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial user intention learning approach for sequential recommendaiton . the approach explicitly predicts user current intentions by taking historical reviews as inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach explicitly predicts user intentions by inferring their decision-making process as explained in target reviews. |
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. |
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) however, current QA synthesis protocols introduce noise from the CSKB and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts and mislabeled or false-negative options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches while using only 33% of the synthetic data. |
Diagnosing Vision-and-Language Navigation: What Really Matters (2022.naacl-main)
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Wanrong Zhu, Yuankai Qi, Pradyumna Narayana, Kazoo Sone, Sugato Basu, Xin Wang, Qi Wu, Miguel Eckstein, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing models claim to be able to align object tokens with specific visual targets, but there are non-negligible gaps between the two. |
| Approach: | They conduct diagnostic experiments to examine how the agents perceive multimodal input by ablation diagnostics input data. |
| Outcome: | The results show that indoor and outdoor navigation agents refer to object and direction tokens when making decisions. |
AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models (2023.acl-short)
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Siheng Li, Cheng Yang, Yichun Yin, Xinyu Zhu, Zesen Cheng, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing research on information-seeking conversations is stymied by the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use autoconv for synthetic conversation generation to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and fine tune an LLM with a few human conversations to generate synthetic conversations with high quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two commonly-used datasets and alleviates the dependence on human annotation. |
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. |
| Approach: | They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. |
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
Limitations of Autoregressive Models and Their Alternatives (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard autoregressive language models only perform polynomial-time computation to compute probability of next symbol. |
| Approach: | authors propose alternative to standard autoregressive language models that use polynomial-time computation to compute probability of next symbol. |
| Outcome: | a large model size can grow superpolynomially in length, allowing it to store precomputed results and verify solutions. |
One Cannot Stand for Everyone! Leveraging Multiple User Simulators to train Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that Task-oriented Dialogue systems can be more suitable for human users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to optimize ToD systems by leveraging Multiple User SimulaTors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on multiWOZ with human evaluations and automatic evaluations. |
Controlled Text Generation Using Dictionary Prior in Variational Autoencoders (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely applied in text generation tasks, but they suffer from insufficient representation capacity and poor controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven prior that has expressivity and controllability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prior enjoys expressivity and controllability and can be used in language modeling and controlled text generation. |
Operator Selection and Ordering in a Pipeline Approach to Efficiency Optimizations for Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Natural language processing tasks rely on complex neural models . transformer-based models are typically slow to execute, making it a non-trivial challenge to apply them in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to consider an efficiency method as an operator applied on a model . they find that the commutativity and cumulativeness of efficiency operators are plausible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is commutative and cumulative, and the results are estimated by combining methods. |
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiming Zeng, Jinghan Cao, Zexin Li, Wanhao Yu, Zhankai Ye, Dawei Xiang, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao, Tingting Yu
| 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. |
BERT-MK: Integrating Graph Contextualized Knowledge into Pre-trained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods do not use graph contextualized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to model subgraphs in a medical KG and integrate it with a pre-trained language model to do knowledge generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on several medical NLP tasks . it improves on MedERNIE, and the proposed model is effective . |
Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning quality but at the cost of efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks while remaining highly efficient. |
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. |
FreeTransfer-X: Safe and Label-Free Cross-Lingual Transfer from Off-the-Shelf Models (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-lingual transfer has not studied how to leverage knowledge of rich-resource languages without labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a 2-step knowledge distillation framework to achieve knowledge transfer from off-the-shelf models in rich-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces annotation cost and protects private labels. |
Knowledge Graph Embedding by Adaptive Limit Scoring Loss Using Dynamic Weighting Strategy (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models use a loss framework to distinguish between correct and incorrect triplets. |
| Approach: | They propose a loss framework that reweights each triplet to highlight the less-optimized triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on several knowledge graph embedding models, including TransE, TransH and ComplEx. |
SCOPE: Compress Mathematical Reasoning Steps for Efficient Automated Process Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing process annotation approaches are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based approach that transforms reasoning steps into code and normalizes them through Abstract Syntax Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on Best-of-N strategy and ProcessBench. |
Great~Truths~are ~Always ~Simple: A Rather Simple Knowledge Encoder for Enhancing the Commonsense Reasoning Capacity of Pre-Trained Models (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance pre-trained language models (PTMs) with a knowledge-aware graph neural network (GNN) encoder that models a commonsense knowledge graph (CSKG) can't explain how external knowledge resources improve the reasoning capacity of PTMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use relation features from CSKGs to enhance the reasoning capacity of pre-trained language models (PTMs) by encoding a commonsense knowledge graph (CSKG) |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the parameters for encoding CSKGs and improves on five benchmarks. |
Leveraging Unpaired Feedback for Long-Term LLM-based Recommendation Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study highlights unpaired feedback as a key challenge for long-term LLM-based recommenders . unpaired user feedback is crucial for improving LLMs in dynamic user environments, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates unpaired feedback into LLMs to improve long-term recommendation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-term recommendation performance by incorporating unpaired feedback without requiring paired supervision. |
DGPO: Beyond Pairwise Preferences with Directional Consistent Groupwise Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for directional consistency alignment of large language models are limited . a recent study suggests reverse supervision as a complement to forward reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aggregates supervision signals at the group level and explicitly models direction-aware alignment through multi-candidate comparisons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 3.2% accuracy improvement across five benchmarks and multiple datasets. |
ToolPRM: Fine-Grained Inference Scaling of Structured Outputs for Function Calling (2026.acl-long)
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Jianghao Lin, Yuanyuan Shi, Xin Peng, Renjie Ding, Hairui Wang, Yuxuan Peng, Bizhe Bai, Weixi Song, Fengshuo Bai, Huacan Chai, Weinan Zhang, Fei Huang, Ying Wen
| Challenge: | Existing research on inference scaling focuses on unstructured output generation tasks, such as mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-scaling framework that combines fine-grained beam search with ToolPRM, a process reward model scoring each intra-call decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms outcome and coarse-grained reward models in predictive accuracy and yields consistent test-time gains on multiple function-calling benchmarks. |
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 . |
Crowdsourcing Learning as Domain Adaptation: A Case Study on Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that crowdsourced annotations are highly effective under supervised conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotator-aware representation learning model that is inspired by domain adaptation methods which attempt to capture effective domain-alike features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly effective on a benchmark dataset and achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a very small scale of expert annotations. |
Challenging the Boundaries of Reasoning: An Olympiad-Level Math Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for large reasoning models are saturated by a lack of reliable and verifiable benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously curated, Olympiad-level math benchmark comprising 350 problems, each with parallel English and Chinese versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark unifies two evaluation paradigms and offers 150 problems formalized in Lean 4 for rigorous process-level evaluation. |
A Lifelong Multilingual Multi-granularity Semantic Alignment Approach via Maximum Co-occurrence Probability (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mask and predict tokens in multilingual text limit multilingual interaction . |
| Approach: | They propose a lifelong multilingual multi-granularity semantic alignment approach which continuously extracts massive aligned linguistic units from noisy data via a maximum co-occurrence probability algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation performance on WMT14 18 benchmarks in twelve directions. |
SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLM (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jielin Qiu, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Paul Crook, Yifan Xu, Babak Damavandi, Xin Dong, Christos Faloutsos, Lei Li, Seungwhan Moon
| Challenge: | Vision-extended LLMs have made significant strides in VQA, but they still encounter significant difficulties in handling queries involving long-tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test models' ability to identify entities and provide detailed, entity-specific knowledge by combining 10 images and 10 knowledge-intensive QA pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the SnapNTell dataset, achieving a 66.5% improvement in the BELURT score. |
CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | CharacterEval is a benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment in Chinese . authors show that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in role-playing conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment . they use a dataset of Chinese role-playing dialogues and character profiles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in Chinese role-playing conversation. |
Event Causality Extraction with Event Argument Correlations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event Causality Identification (ECI) ignores crucial event structure and cause-effect component information, making it struggle for downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to extract event causality pairs with their structured event information from plain text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures the intra- and inter-event argument correlations for ECE and provides several future directions. |
Read before Generate! Faithful Long Form Question Answering with Machine Reading (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-form question answering (LFQA) generates a paragraph-length answer for a given question. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly models answer generation and machine reading. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates a more factually accurate answer from millions of documents retrieved from a large dataset. |
Video2Roleplay: A Multimodal Dataset and Framework for Video-Guided Role-playing Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RPAs focus on static role profiles, overlooking dynamic perceptual abilities inherent to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aerial visionand-dialling navigation (AVDN) is a new approach to autonomous drones that can converse with humans and follow natural language commands to complete tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Aerial Visionand-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) to navigate a drone via natural language conversation by collecting a dataset of over 3k recorded navigation trajectories with asynchronous human-human dialogs between commanders and followers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can converse with humans and follow natural language commands to fly to the expected destination. |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial question answering datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for long-form question answering in finance to evaluate QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites. |
UCS: Estimating Unseen Coverage for Improved In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing selection methods prioritize heuristic notions of relevance or diversity and provide limited insight into the coverage of a demonstration set. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, subset-level coverage prior that is unrevealed by a model-consistent embedding and a Smoothed Good-Turing estimator to estimate the number of unrevelled clusters within a candidate subset. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple intent-classification and reasoning benchmarks show that augmenting strong baselines with UCS improves ICL accuracy by 2-6% under the same selection budget. |
BIG-Bench Extra Hard (2025.acl-long)
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Mehran Kazemi, Bahare Fatemi, Hritik Bansal, John Palowitch, Chrysovalantis Anastasiou, Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Lalit K Jain, Virginia Aglietti, Disha Jindal, Peter Chen, Nishanth Dikkala, Gladys Tyen, Xin Liu, Uri Shalit, Silvia Chiappa, Kate Olszewska, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Quoc V Le, Orhan Firat
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks for large language model reasoning focus on math and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate general reasoning in large language models . they use BIG-Bench and its harder version BIG-Benefit Hard to assess general reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark pushes the boundaries of LLM reasoning evaluation. |
Towards Understanding Sample Variance in Visually Grounded Language Generation: Evaluations and Observations (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | A major challenge in visually grounded language generation is to build robust benchmark datasets and models that can generalize well in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to use visual attention to build robust benchmark datasets and models that can generalize well in real-world settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that human-generated references vary drastically in different datasets/tasks, revealing the nature of each task. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
MASTER: Multi-Agent Security Through Exploration of Roles and Topological Structures - A Comprehensive Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) exhibit remarkable problem-solving and task planning capabilities across diverse domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a security research framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems . they propose corresponding defense strategies to address MAS security risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework amplifies the severity of security risks under MAS attacks . it offers an automated construction process for different MAS setups and an interaction paradigm . |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence. |
From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity Alignment (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-lingual entity alignment rely on lexical matching and probability reasoning, but they inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective unsupervised entity alignment method without neural networks that can be used to find the equivalent entities between crosslingual KGs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method beats advanced supervised methods across all datasets while having high efficiency, interpretability, and stability. |
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. |
HyPA-RAG: A Hybrid Parameter Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for AI Legal and Policy Applications (2025.naacl-industry)
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Rishi Kalra, Zekun Wu, Ayesha Gulley, Airlie Hilliard, Xin Guan, Adriano Koshiyama, Philip Colin Treleaven
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations due to outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and poor reasoning in complex contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid Parameter-Adaptive RAG system for the AI legal domain with NYC Local Law 144 as the test case. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves retrieval accuracy, response fidelity, and contextual precision on NYC Local Law 144 . Empirical evidence indicates that many AI tools overstate their ability to prevent hallucinations in legal and policy contexts. |
LLMsPark: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Strategic Gaming Contexts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly important for their intelligence evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a game theory-based evaluation platform that measures LLMs’ decision-making strategies and social behaviors in classic game-theoretic settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system cross-evaluates 15 leading LLMs using leaderboard rankings and scoring mechanisms. |
HyperText: Endowing FastText with Hyperbolic Geometry (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, we show that HyperText outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses hyperbolic geometry to model tree-like hierarchies in natural language sentences by embedding words or ngrams in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks (2022.coling-1)
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Xin Zhou, Ruotian Ma, Yicheng Zou, Xuanting Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Rui Xie, Wei Wu
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mis- and disinformation online are a major source of harms of different kinds . out-of-context information is where different pieces of information are falsely associated . past studies have attempted to defend against OOC mis- and deinformation through external evidence, but they disregard the role of different pieces with different stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a stance extraction network that can extract stances of different pieces of evidence in a single framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a public large-scale dataset with a performance gain of 3.2% in accuracy. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
Accurate Word Alignment Induction from Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work suggests that Transformer captures poor word alignments through its attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose two new word alignment induction methods that use attention weights to capture accurate word alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform baselines on three publicly available datasets and are significantly better than GIZA++. |
Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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Haoli Bai, Zhiguang Liu, Xiaojun Meng, Li Wentao, Shuang Liu, Yifeng Luo, Nian Xie, Rongfu Zheng, Liangwei Wang, Lu Hou, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for visual document understanding lack granularity of document textlines. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised pre-training program to leverage structural knowledge nested in document textlines to achieve fine-grained alignment between visual regions and texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better on various VDU tasks in English and Chinese. |
Enhancing Neural Topic Model with Multi-Level Supervisions from Seed Words (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic seed words are difficult to incorporate into topic models due to the semantic diversity of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural topic model enhanced with supervisions from seed words on word and document levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art seeded topic models in terms of topic quality and classification accuracy. |
Don’t Forget Your Reward Values: Language Model Alignment via Value-based Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models have been criticized for their complexity and instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a value-based calibration method to better align Large Language Models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on AI assistant and summarization datasets, providing impressive generalizability, robustness, and diversity in different settings. |
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating vulnerability repair suffer from syntactic overfitting . nvd published 49,230 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in 2025 alone . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware reward framework that optimizes for code semantic equivalence rather than lexical mimicry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on repository-level splits . it incorporates expert-aligned reasoning mechanism that grounds patch generation in structured diagnosis. |
LogRules: Enhancing Log Analysis Capability of Large Language Models through Rules (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations when analyzing logs due to the implicit knowledge and rules in logs that LLMs cannot capture. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight log analysis framework that generates and utilizes rules through LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms LLM-based methods in log parsing and anomaly detection tasks and achieves better performance compared to case-based approaches. |
exBERT: Extending Pre-trained Models with Domain-specific Vocabulary Under Constrained Training Resources (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train pre-trained models with limited corpus and computational resources are limited by the complexity of the training resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extend BERT pre-trained models from a general domain to a new pre-train model for a specific domain with a different additive vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on biomedical benchmark tasks using the MTL-Bioinformatics-2016 dataset. |
BinaryBERT: Pushing the Limit of BERT Quantization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance improvement in various tasks, but the improvement generally comes at the cost of increasing model size and computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a binary quantization technique which initializes binaryBERT by splitting from a ternary network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 24x smaller. |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
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Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Zhihua Wu, Zhen Guo, Hua Lu, Xinxian Huang, Xin Tian, Xinchao Xu, Yingzhan Lin, Zheng-Yu Niu
| Challenge: | Experimental results show PLATO-XL achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLATO-XL models with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on Chinese and English social media conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI. |
Exploring Discourse Structures for Argument Impact Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that discourse structures influence the persuasiveness of arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models to investigate how discourse relations influence argument impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves its backbone RoBERTa around 1.67%, compared with other models, but side effects are brought by other models. |
VisCGEC: Benchmarking the Visual Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese grammatical error correction ignore multi-modality and faked errors, which pushes techniques far away from real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark Chinese grammatical error correction for Chinese as a foreign language learner (CFL) using a dataset, they propose to use two CGEC frameworks to conduct experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an F 0.5 score of only 28.9%. |
XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs (2026.acl-long)
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Yitian Gong, Luozhijie Jin, Kuangwei Chen, Dong Zhang, Ruifan Deng, Xiaogui Yang, Xin Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates . XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codec . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bitrate speech codec that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing low-bitrate speech codecs in speech understanding and generation tasks. |
Segment-Level and Category-Oriented Network for Knowledge-Based Referring Expression Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods employ sentence-level retrieval and fusion methods, which may lead to similarity bias and interference from irrelevant information in unstructured knowledge sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a segment-level and category-oriented network to solve similarity bias problem by segmenting and prompting knowledge retrieval methods and a category-based grounding method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model eliminates similarity bias and improves the overall performance of the KB-REC task. |
Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)
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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm for large-scale language models. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on diverse tasks and rich resources with different learning capacities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve remarkable performance in high-resource and multi-task scenarios, even comparable to full fine-tuning. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
Can LLMs Hear the Dogwhistle? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Liu, Yi Lin, Xinwei Guo, Ziwei Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Haiyan Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Existing safety benchmarks focus on explicitly harmful content, but ignore context-dependent expressions such as dogwhistles. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating LLM safety under dogwhistle-driven prompts . their findings expose a blind spot in current safety evaluation practices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared safety performance with toxic terms using dogwhistle-driven prompts. |
Exploring Response Uncertainty in MLLMs: An Empirical Evaluation under Misleading Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunkai Dang, Mengxi Gao, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Yanggan Gu, Jungang Li, Jingyu Wang, Peijie Jiang, Aiwei Liu, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused mainly on visual–textual misalignment, leaving largely unexplored the MLLMs’ ability to preserve an original correct answer when confronted with misleading information. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage evaluation pipeline to quantify the response uncertainty phenomenon by eliciting each model’s original response on unperturbed inputs and injecting explicit (false-answer hints) and implicit (contextual contradictions) misleading instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overturns a correct answer in 65% of cases after receiving a single deceptive cue. |
MELM: Data Augmentation with Masked Entity Language Modeling for Low-Resource NER (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) tasks have limited amount of labeled data . data augmentation methods suffer from token-label misalignment, which leads to unsatsifactory performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that explicitly injects NER labels into sentence context and generates high-quality augmented data with novel entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on low-resource tasks. |
Substance over Style: Evaluating Proactive Conversational Coaching Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Vidya Srinivas, Xuhai Xu, Xin Liu, Kumar Ayush, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Tim Althoff
| Challenge: | Recent NLP research has focused on single-turn tasks with well-defined objectives or evaluation criteria. |
| Approach: | They describe five multi-turn coaching agents that exhibit distinct conversational styles and evaluate them through a user study. |
| Outcome: | The authors compare user feedback with third-person evaluations from health experts and an LM to find that stylistic components in absence of core functionality are viewed negatively. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
Understanding Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment through Reward Consistency (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training pipelines still face alignment conflicts where optimizing for one objective degrades performance on others. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based criterion that approximates alignment conflicts via reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves harmlessness and helpfulness scores by 23.07% over the vanilla dataset. |
No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Current methods for training Large Language Model agents rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a critique and a policy to optimize the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments. |
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing language models only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an entailment graph that collects abstract knowledge for 3 components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks. |
ViFT: Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Visual instruction tuning is the predominant technology in eliciting multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for large vision-language models . they require only text-only instructions and image caption data during training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on visual instruction tuning, but requires images as input . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several downstream benchmarks with less training data. |
Probabilistically Masked Language Model Capable of Autoregressive Generation in Arbitrary Word Order (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models such as masked language model (MLM) have brought significant improvements to many NLU and NLG tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic masking scheme for the masked language model and a model with a uniform prior distribution on the masking ratio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms BERT on a bunch of downstream NLG tasks. |
A Multi-Level Attention Model for Evidence-Based Fact Checking (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art approaches have developed increasingly sophisticated models based on graph structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple model that can be trained on sequence structures and can benefit from joint training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the graph-based models on a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification. |
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. |
NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation Surrounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Zheye Deng, Wei Fan, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Theory of mind evaluations currently focus on testing models using machine-generated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. |
When Benchmarks Age: Temporal Misalignment through Large Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM factuality evaluation have not investigated the reliability of static evaluation benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They examine five popular factuality benchmarks and eight LLMs released over different years to assess their reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compared five popular factuality benchmarks and eight LLMs released over different years. |
Evaluating LLMs on Large-Scale Graph Property Estimation via Random Walks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved reasoning abilities but are limited due to limited context length. |
| Approach: | They propose a large graph benchmark dataset and propose four tasks to evaluate LLMs' reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks evaluate the reasoning abilities of LLMs on a large graph benchmark dataset. |
Probing the Safety Robustness of LLMs in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Gu, Kexin Huang, Zongqi Wang, Yixu Wang, Jie Li, Xin Wang, Yang Yao, Yujiu Yang, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Despite substantial progress in safety alignment techniques, aligned large language models can still produce unsafe responses under minor internal perturbations. |
| Approach: | They introduce Activation Steering Attack (ASA) and leverage the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) as a diagnostic signal to probe the local sensitivity of safety behaviors in latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is model-agnostic and supervision-free, enabling a general and reproducible diagnostic metric for analyzing safety robustness. |
PychoAgent: Psychology-driven LLM Agents for Explainable Panic Prediction on Social Media during Sudden Disaster Events (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mengzhu Liu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chuan Ai, Chen Gao, Xinghong Li, Lingnan He, Kaisheng Lai, Yingfeng Chen, Xin Lu, Yong Li, Quanjun Yin
| Challenge: | Social media's rich information content and spatiotemporal granularity provide unique opportunities for emotion prediction and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a Psychology-driven generative Agent framework for explainable panic prediction based on emotion arousal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves panic emotion prediction performance by 13% to 21% compared to baseline models. |
A Chinese Corpus for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for fine-grained entity typing are limited to English . a corpus of 4,800 mentions is manually labeled with free-form entity types . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese fine-grained entity typing task that uses crowdsourcing . they categorize each mention into 10 general types and use a large tag set to predict open set of types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 4,800 mentions manually labeled in Chinese . it also categorizes all the fine-grained types into 10 general types . |
Watch, Listen, and Describe: Globally and Locally Aligned Cross-Modal Attentions for Video Captioning (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal fusion methods have shown encouraging results in video understanding, but how to selectively fuse the multi-dimensional representations at different levels of details remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchically aligned cross-modal attention framework to fuse audio and visual cues at different levels of detail. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the previous best systems on the video captioning task. |
Stepwise Reasoning Checkpoint Analysis: A Test Time Scaling Method to Enhance LLMs’ Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing methods that use Chain-of-Thought suffer from path homogenization and inefficient use of intermediate results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces checkpoints between reasoning steps to reduce path homogenization and create fault-tolerant mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces path homogenization and creates fault-tolerant mechanism by utilizing high-quality intermediate results. |
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method which re-ranks passages based on the reader's prediction probability distribution and clusters passage according to the predicted answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot scenarios. |
Instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction with Shallow Aggressive Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve online inference efficiency of the Transformer for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) are sequenceto-sequence (seq2sequ) and sequenceto sequence (saq2eq) |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to improve the online inference efficiency of the Transformer model for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) it aggressively decodes as many tokens as possible in parallel instead of always decoding only one token in each step to improve computational parallelism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results in English and Chinese benchmarks with 10x speedup over the Transformer-big model. |
MMATH: A Multilingual Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a benchmark for multilingual complex reasoning spans 374 high-quality math problems across 10 typologically diverse languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multilingual complex reasoning across 10 languages . they show reasoning in English and answering in target languages can enhance performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that models with high-quality reasoning can perform in multiple languages. |
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. |
Data-Centric Explainable Debiasing for Improving Fairness in Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data-centric debiasing strategies mainly leverage explicit bias words for counterfactual data augmentation to balance the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses an explainability method to search for implicit bias words to assist in debiasing PLMs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art debiasing performance and strong generalization while maintaining predictive abilities. |
QuickLLaMA: Query-aware Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with capturing long-distance dependencies within sequences to deeply understand semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that captures relevant information within a fixed window size and provides precise answers to queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can read Harry Potter within 30s and accurately answer the questions. |
Don’t Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to generate empathy with other-awareness ignore to include self-a awareness to consider the own views of the self in their responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to include self-awareness to consider the own views of the self in empathetic response generation by integrating three stages of self-other awareness into the process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on the benchmark dataset. |
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models. |
Unseen Entity Handling in Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base via Language Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for complex question answering are limited in the search space of all possible relation paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly generates an executable SPARQL query without simplification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the previous methods and has higher interpretability and computational efficiency than the previous ones. |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
Semantic-Preserving Abstractive Text Summarization with Siamese Generative Adversarial Net (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on attention mechanism, but they are not suitable for abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese generative adversarial net for abstractive text summarization which preserves the main semantics of the source text and the target summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can preserve the main semantics of the source text and target summary. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
P²Net: Parallel Pointer-based Network for Key Information Extraction with Complex Layouts (2025.findings-acl)
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Kaiwen Wei, Jie Yao, Jiang Zhong, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Changlong Sun, Xin Zhang, Fengmao Lv, Li Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for key information extraction are based on a limited set of entity categories and fixed layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, human-annotated dataset for key information extraction . it is based on a human-annotated layout and 1,162 entity categories . they propose 'parallel pointer-based network' that leverages implicit relationships . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on widely-used datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining fast inference speeds. |
RV-Syn: Rational and Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis based on Structured Function Library (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality reasoning data are limited in quality and availability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs mathematical operations and generates verifiable graphs that are back-translated into complex problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 6.3% performance gain over existing methods on LLaMA-3-8B and outperforms others with only half the training data (50k vs. 100k). |
How Well Can Large Language Models Reflect? A Human Evaluation of LLM-generated Reflections for Motivational Interviewing Dialogues (2025.coling-main)
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Erkan Basar, Xin Sun, Iris Hendrickx, Jan de Wit, Tibor Bosse, Gert-Jan De Bruijn, Jos A. Bosch, Emiel Krahmer
| Challenge: | Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a counseling technique that promotes behavioral change through reflective responses to mirror or refine client statements. |
| Approach: | They assess the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate MI reflections via three LLMs: GPT-4, Llama-2, and BLOOM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models generate meaningful reflections comparable to human therapists, but significant challenges remain. |
Relation-aware Video Reading Comprehension for Temporal Language Grounding (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal language grounding in videos are boundary regression and span extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-aware Network to localize a temporal span relevant to a given query sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework selects a video moment choice from the predefined answer set with the aid of coarse-and-fine choice-query interaction and choice-choice relation construction. |
T2IAT: Measuring Valence and Stereotypical Biases in Text-to-Image Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-image generative models have produced high quality images with a breakthrough of inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-image association test framework that quantifies implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence and those in images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence and those in images. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on English data for training, but are often not comparable across other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a family of open language models for SEA languages . they use BPE dropout, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication to improve model robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well across four benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. |
LLM-OREF: An Open Relation Extraction Framework Based on Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building models that can only handle predefined relations . however, their reliance on human annotation limits their practicality . |
| Approach: | They propose an open relation extraction framework that can generalize to new relations not encountered during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize to new relations not encountered during training. |
Dialogue Summarization with Static-Dynamic Structure Fusion Graph (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue summarization is a challenging task since it has dynamic interaction nature and inconsistent information flow among various speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a Static-Dynamic graph-based Dialogue Summarization model which fuses prior knowledge from human expertise and adaptively learns the graph structure in an end-to-end learning fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can help people capture the highlights of a semi-structured and multi-participant dialogue without reviewing the complex dialogue context. |
Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
Towards Robust Low-Resource Fine-Tuning with Multi-View Compressed Representations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using hidden representations, pretrained language models are prone to overfitting due to the huge amount of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that inserts random autoencoders between hidden layers of a PLM to transform activations from the previous layers into multi-view compressed representations before feeding them into the upper layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across sequence- and token-level lowresource tasks. |
GR1: Reinforcement-Enhanced LLM for Geoscience Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yule Xie, Jiaxin Ding, Cheng Deng, Shiqing Gao, Junran Zhang, Sibo Zhang, Zeyuan Wang, Ke Wu, Xin Ding, Luoyi Fu, Meng Jin, Xinbing Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated RL's substantial capacity to enhance multi-step reasoning beyond what supervised instruction tuning achieves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts multimodal questions into descriptive text . they propose RL-enhanced geoscience reasoning that can be fine-tuned to a text-only level . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and accuracy on multimodal questions while preserving answerability and difficulty. |
Unlocking Data-free Low-bit Quantization with Matrix Decomposition for KV Cache Compression (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress KV cache compromise precision or require extra data for calibration, limiting their practicality in LLM deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bit quantization technique based on tensor decomposition to effectively compress KV cache. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory footprint and performance by 75% . it is compared with existing methods that compromise precision or require extra data for calibration . |
A Graph Interaction Framework on Relevance for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Multiple Images (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine whether images are related to named entities are not effective in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph interaction framework on relevance for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with multiple images to integrate human abilities into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets and compares with CLIP and CLIP-based approaches. |
MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory systems can support long-horizon human-LLM interactions by persisting historical interactions beyond limited context windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments memory systems with a self-evolving meta-memory . meta-meso is iteratively distilling transferable knowledge utilization experiences . results show MetaMem outperforms strong baselines by over 3.6% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by over 3.6% in the long-horizon human-LLM interaction. |
Inserting Information Bottlenecks for Attribution in Transformers (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained transformers are a popular approach for understanding features important for prediction. |
| Approach: | They apply information bottlenecks to analyze attribution of features for prediction on a black-box model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms two competing methods in degradation tests on four datasets. |
Enhanced Language Representation with Label Knowledge for Span Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract text spans from plain text do not fully exploit label knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to integrate label knowledge into text representations by encoding texts and annotations independently and then integrating label knowledge with an elaborate-designed semantics fusion module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks and reduces training time and inference time by 76% and 77% on average compared with the existing paradigm. |
Differentiating Concepts and Instances for Knowledge Graph Embedding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods encode concepts and instances as vectors in a low-dimensional space, ignoring the difference between concepts and instance. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph embedding model that separates concepts from instances by differentiating concepts and instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on link prediction and triple classification tasks on YAGO dataset. |
Diffusion Based Counterfactual Augmentation for Dual Sentiment Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment sentiment models have failed to mitigate spurious association problem inherent in the original data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing sentiment models using an antonymous paradigm and contrastive learning to generate high-quality samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets. |
MedWriter: Knowledge-Aware Medical Text Generation (2020.coling-main)
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Youcheng Pan, Qingcai Chen, Weihua Peng, Xiaolong Wang, Baotian Hu, Xin Liu, Junying Chen, Wenxiu Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on the information of unstructured text rather than structured information of the knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware text generation model for medical domains that incorporates knowledge graphs into the model to improve the quality of generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality of generated text and has robust superiority over other methods. |
What Part of the Neural Network Does This? Understanding LSTMs by Measuring and Dissecting Neurons (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Biological neural systems consist of a huge number of neurons, and can react to the environment in complicated ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to quantify the sensitivity of neurons to each label and conduct experiments to prove it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is based on a set of experiments that show that dropping an arbitrary neuron significantly degrades the accuracy of the model. |
Position IDs Matter: An Enhanced Position Layout for Efficient Context Compression in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress context information ignore holistic contextual dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts position encodings to minimize the distance between context tokens and special tokens. |
| Outcome: | Enhanced Position Layout (EPL) improves compression of context information in large language models. |
Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in LLMs from an Unveiling Perspective of Safety Decision Boundary (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often refuse to answer legitimate queries, causing models to treat many reasonable prompts as potentially risky. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically generates and selects overrefusal prompts near the safety boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and curates boundary-aligned prompts, enabling more effective and targeted mitigation of overrefusal. |
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extended context windows through scaling positional encodings and lightweight continual pre-training, but performance degradation is still not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to reduce short-text performance degradation by minimizing distribution drift in hidden states and attention scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes the distribution discrepancy between the extended and original models while maintaining or even enhancing the model's long-context abilities. |
RGL: A Simple yet Effective Relation Graph Augmented Prompt-based Tuning Approach for Few-Shot Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are a good starting point for downstream applications, but it is difficult to generalize them to new tasks given a few labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Relation Graph augmented learning to improve the performance of few-shot natural language understanding tasks by rewriting the input sequence into a cloze question with masks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that Relation Graph augmented learning (RGL) improves performance of prompt-based tuning strategies. |
Assessing Combinational Generalization of Language Models in Biased Scenarios (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on assessing in-domain knowledge, but shedding light on what pre-trained Language Models learn is important. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess a PLM's generalization capacity in biased scenarios by combining component combinations where it could be easy for the PLMs to learn shortcuts from the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can overcome distribution shifts in the training corpus and with sufficient data. |
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks, but their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate counterfactuals based on key factors including intrinsic properties and prompt design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the strengths and weaknesses of large language models (LLMs) and identifies factors that influence their ability to generate counterfactuals. |
BPO: Towards Balanced Preference Optimization between Knowledge Breadth and Depth in Alignment (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the key to the success of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to balance the number of prompts and responses to improve knowledge breadth and knowledge depth by introducing gradient-based clustering to estimate the knowledge informativeness and usefulness of each augmented sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while maintaining training efficiency. |
Syntax-Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to aspect-level sentiment classification focus on modeling the relationship between aspect words and their contexts with attention, and ignore the use of elaborate knowledge implicit in the context. |
| Approach: | They exploit syntactic awareness to the model by the graph attention network on the dependency tree structure and external pre-training knowledge by BERT language model, which helps to model the interaction between the context and aspect words better. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the interaction between the context and aspect words better by using syntactic awareness and external pre-training knowledge. |
WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various vision-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy to evaluate MLLMs' ability to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on real-world music scores and user-generated questions and discussions, and is scalable and controlled. |
PLAN-TUNING: Post-Training Language Models to Learn Step-by-Step Planning for Complex Problem Solving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Xin Liu, Yiwen Song, Mingyang Ling, Chitta Baral, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-training framework that distills synthetic task decompositions and fine-tunes smaller LLMs via supervised and reinforcement-learning objectives to improve complex reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on GSM8k and MATH benchmarks and shows that it can improve generalization capabilities on out-of-domain datasets. |
Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning methods for sparse KGs are incomplete and lack of evidential paths to target entities makes multi-hop reasoning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs to solve this problem . they use latent prediction of embedding-based models to make the model perform more potential path search over sparses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on five datasets from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata. |
Self-Supervised Sentence Polishing by Adding Engaging Modifiers (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | a typical way to polish sentences is to add engaging modifiers, which enhance the meaning of the sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires polishing sentences while maintaining fluency . they remove engaging modifiers from public resources and fine-tune LongLM to reconstruct original sentences from corrupted ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more engaging sentences with suitable modifiers than strong baselines while keeping fluency. |
Separate the Wheat from the Chaff: A Post-Hoc Approach to Safety Re-Alignment for Fine-Tuned Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, but fine-tuning often compromises safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs safety realignment for large language models . they identify unsafe delta parameters from the fine-tuned models and recalibrate the retained parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety performance on safety benchmarks and jailbreak attacks while maintaining their performance on downstream tasks. |
Interpretable Research Replication Prediction via Variational Contextual Consistency Sentence Masking (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting research replication are insufficient especially for long research papers. |
| Approach: | They propose to build an interpretable neural model which can provide sentence-level explanations and apply weakly supervised approach to leverage large corpus of unlabeled datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can provide sentence-level explanations and leverage large unlabeled datasets to boost interpretability and improve prediction performance. |
PDFMathTranslate: Scientific Document Translation Preserving Layouts (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Prior efforts in translating scientific documents overlooked layouts . PDFMathTranslate is open-source with more than 222k downloads - a record for the first time ever. |
| Approach: | They propose PDFMathTranslate, the world's first open-source software for translating scientific documents while preserving layouts. |
| Outcome: | The work is open-sourced at https://github.com/byaidu/pdfmathtranslate with more than 222k downloads. |
Read Extensively, Focus Smartly: A Cross-document Semantic Enhancement Method for Visual Documents NER (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract entities from visually-rich documents ignore the inherent multimodality of VRDs and thus the suboptimal results are achieved. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal semantic enhancement method that filters redundant information in the current document and a cross-document information awareness technique to enrich the entity-related context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two documents understanding benchmarks covering eight languages. |
Sentiment Analysis on Streaming User Reviews via Dual-Channel Dynamic Graph Neural Network (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment analysis on user reviews neglect their time-varying characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-channel framework that models temporal user and product dynamics for sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing methods on five real-world datasets. |
Probing and Boosting Large Language Models Capabilities via Attention Heads (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying capabilities rely on external signals with limited structural grounding . emergence of specific capabilities remains poorly understood . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight approach that links LLM capabilities to internal components by identifying correspondences at the level of attention heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy on MMLU and BBH by 1 to 1.5 points over gradient-based method and 5 to 6 points over other intermediate-state baselines. |
TrajGuard: Streaming Hidden-state Trajectory Detection for Decoding-time Jailbreak Defense (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak defense paradigms rely on static detection of prompts, outputs, or internal states . hidden states in critical layers during decoding carry stronger and more stable risk signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-time defense framework that aggregates hidden-state trajectories via a sliding window to quantify risk in real time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average defense rate of 95% in 12 jailbreak attacks and open-source LLMs. |
Multimodal Procedural Planning via Dual Text-Image Prompting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Embodied agents have demonstrated performance in following instructions informed by texts and images . however, the potential of models providing useful guidelines for humans to complete tasks remains underexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal procedural planning task that generates paired text-image plans . this task provides more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans a . authors propose modality prompting methods that leverage zero-shot reasoning ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the interaction in dual modalities and provides more information than unimodal plans. |
Jointly Identifying Rhetoric and Implicit Emotions via Multi-Task Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results validate the benefit of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art baselines for rhetoric and emotion identification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that can encode categorical correlation between tasks to improve rhetoric and emotion identification problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode the categorical correlation between tasks to improve rhetoric and emotion identification problem. |
Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Aligning Attention Distribution to Information Flow (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Decode-Only models propagate information from left to right, but the model's attention still focuses on the visual representations, resulting in hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the core information embedded in semantic representations to enhance the model's visual understanding by leveraging the attention distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations by 80% by aligning the attention distribution with the actual information flow. |
Towards Realistic Low-resource Relation Extraction: A Benchmark with Empirical Baseline Study (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract relational facts from text are limited in their ability to learn from limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data to evaluate performance . data augmentation technologies and self-training are also proposed to generate more labeles in-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well in low-resource settings with 8 relation extraction datasets. |
URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rank and generate large language models have limited performance due to time-intensive nature of ranking process and lack of error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly ranks the outputs of Large Language Models and generates fine-grained fusion results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ranking and generation tasks. |
Extracting and Combining Abilities For Building Multi-lingual Ability-enhanced Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work relies on training with multi-lingual ability-related data, which may not be available for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual ability-enhanced LLM that extracts language-agnostic ability-related weights from LLMs and combine them across different languages by simple addition and subtraction operations without training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts language-agnostic ability-related weights from LLMs and combine them across different languages without training. |
Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicons Induced from Labeled Documents (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentiment lexicons reflect abstract notion of polarity and do not do justice to substantial differences of word polarities between domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use domain-specific sentiment lexicons to induce initial word intensity scores and train new deep models based on word vector representations to overcome the scarcity of the seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that they perform well on review classification and cross-lingual word sentiment prediction. |
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Hu Yiwen, Huatong Song, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Yang Lu, Xu Miao, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
Beyond Pedagogical Principles: Multi-Horizon Preference Optimization for Efficient Socratic Tutoring (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for developing LLMs are constrained by static data or sparse reward signals in online settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively refines tutor agents using a multi-horizon reward function within a dynamic teacher-student simulation environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance and balances principles and effectiveness compared to baselines. |
What Matters in Memorizing and Recalling Facts? Multifaceted Benchmarks for Knowledge Probing in Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models often exhibit factual hallucination issue, exhibiting factual factual knowledge-grounded sentences. |
| Approach: | They introduce a knowledge probing benchmark to evaluate the knowledge recall ability of pre-trained language models from diverse perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the knowledge recall ability of encoder- and decoder-based pre-trained language models from diverse perspectives. |
DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to planning involve implicit planning or introduce explicit planners without systematically optimizing the planning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end RL framework that enhances the planning capabilities of deep research agents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state-of-the-art results under a lower training budget. |
Capturing Nuanced Preferences: Preference-Aligned Distillation for Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning small language models with human values model preference knowledge from large language models (LLMs) however, this limitation hinders student SLMs from capturing nuanced preferences for multiple responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which models teacher's preference knowledge as a probability distribution over all potential preferences, thereby providing more nuanced supervisory signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four benchmark tasks and achieves 20% improvement on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard. |
N-ary Constituent Tree Parsing with Recursive Semi-Markov Model (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based constituent parsing methods generate hidden nodes with the dummy label inside the n-ary nodes to transform the tree into a binary tree for prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based constituent parsing framework that uses a 1-order semi-Markov model to predict the immediate children sequence of a constituent candidate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework obtains the F1 of 95.92% and 92.50% on the datasets of PTB and CTB 5.1 respectively. |
ACE: A LLM-based Negotiation Coaching System (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | The rapid progress of LLMs has led to the development of more sophisticated AI tutoring systems. |
| Approach: | They develop an LLM-based assistant for coaching negotiation that provides users with targeted feedback for improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves negotiation performance significantly compared to a system that doesn’t provide feedback and one which uses an alternative method. |
Cross-lingual Transfer for Text Classification with Dictionary-based Heterogeneous Graph (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual text classification require task-specific training data in high-resource sources . labeling cost, task characteristics, and privacy concerns can hinder the use of cross-linguistic training . |
| Approach: | They propose a dictionary-based heterogeneous graph (DHGNet) that uses bilingual dictionaries for task-independent word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pretrained models even though it does not access to large corpora. |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
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. |
Synonym-unaware Fast Adversarial Training against Textual Adversarial Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial defense methods rely on predetermined linguistic knowledge and assume that attackers’ synonym candidates are known, which is often unrealistic. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast Adversarial Training method that leverages single-step perturbation generation and effective perturbation initialization to improve model robustness without requiring synonym awareness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing models under character-level and word-level attacks while still maintaining the correct syntax. |
Can Prompts Rewind Time for LLMs? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompted Knowledge Cutoffs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for temporal prediction tasks . however, their reliance on pretraining data can lead to contamination concerns . |
| Approach: | They investigate the capability of prompting to simulate an earlier knowledge cutoff in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to induce forgetting when the forgotten content is not directly asked but causally related to the query. |
Large Language Models Are Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Free Reasoners (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across multiple languages, but the relationship between capabilities in different languages is less explored. |
| Approach: | They decompose the process of reasoning tasks into two separate components: knowledge retrieval and knowledge-free reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be transferred across source-target languages despite secondary impact of resource in some specific target languages, while cross-lingual knowledge retrieval significantly hinders the transfer. |
Scale-VAE: Preventing Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model . but when employing strong autoregressive generation networks, VAE tends to converge to a degenerate local optimum known as posterior collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose a model called Scale-VAE to solve a posterior collapse problem . they use a factor to keep the posterior dimension discriminative across data instances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in density estimation and representation learning. |
An Orthogonal High-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) efficiently adapts LLMs to downstream tasks by decomposing LLM’s weight update into trainable low-rank matrices for fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal high-rank adaptation for parameter-efficient fine-tuning that decomposes LLMs’ pre-trained weight matrices into orthogonals via QR decomposition and splits them into two low-redundancy high-ranked components. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OHoRA outperforms LoRA and its variants and generates task-tailored representation spaces with 0.0371% trainable parameters. |
Entity-level Cross-modal Learning Improves Multi-modal Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal machine translation aims at improving translation performance by incorporating visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit entity-level cross-modal learning approach that aims to augment the entity representation by combining a translation task and a reconstruction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art models. |
AgentOCR: Reimagining Agent History via Optical Self-Compression (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning over multi-turn interaction, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token and memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that represents the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves over 95% of text-based agent performance while significantly reducing token consumption (>50%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. |
Identifying Chinese Opinion Expressions with Extremely-Noisy Crowdsourcing Annotations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent works of opinion expression identification (OEI) rely heavily on the quality and scale of the manually-constructed training corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourcing annotations to build a large-scale but quality-unguaranteed corpus for opinion expression identification in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained with a synthetic expert and is highly consistent with the training and testing phase. |
Imagination-Augmented Natural Language Understanding (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Natural Language Understanding focus on textual signals, which hinders models from learning efficiently from limited data samples. |
| Approach: | They propose an Imagination-Augmented Cross-modal Encoder to solve natural language understanding tasks from a novel learning perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm bridges the gap between human and agent language understanding in both linguistic and perceptual procedures. |
Demystifying Data Organization for Enhanced LLM Training (2026.acl-long)
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Yalun Dai, Yangyu Huang, Tongshen Yang, Yonghan Wang, Xin Zhang, Wenshan Wu, Qihao Zhao, Hao Li, Yuanyuan Gao, Kim-Hui Yap, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various fields, yet their training efficiency is heavily reliant on effective data curation. |
| Approach: | They propose to reuse pre-computed sample-level scores originally generated for data efficiency and introduce two new data ordering methods to improve LLM training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the stability and performance of LLM training. |
Open Set Relation Extraction via Unknown-Aware Training (2023.acl-long)
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Jun Zhao, Xin Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Wen Chen, Xiang Gao, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing supervised relation extraction methods can still misclassify unknown relations into known relations due to the lack of supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that regularizes the model by dynamically synthesizing negative instances that can provide the missing supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA unknown relation detection without compromising the classification of known relations. |
Subtopic-driven Multi-Document Summarization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-document summarization model that assumes a set of documents to be summarized is on the same topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Matching Varying-Length Texts via Topic-Informed and Decoupled Sentence Embeddings (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to matching text with non-comparable lengths are limited due to truncation issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that decouples sentences and embeds them into natural sentences for matching texts of significantly different lengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches texts of significantly different lengths across three well-studied datasets. |
Improving Self-training for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Contrastive and Prototype Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to bridge the linguistic gap between self-training and monolingual named entity recognition (NER) however, due to sub-optimal performance on target languages, the pseudo labels are noisy and limit the overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine representation learning and pseudo label refinement in one coherent framework to improve self-training for cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) on multiple transfer pairs. |
SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, but such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model’s capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables detailed characterization of large language models through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
Pan More Gold from the Sand: Refining Open-domain Dialogue Training with Noisy Self-Retrieval Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating open-domain dialogue systems underutilize training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-generation training framework that takes advantage of heterogeneous training data by considering them as "evidence" they use BERTScore retrieval framework which gives better qualities of the training data, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on zero-shot experiments and is more robust to real-world data. |
RetroGAN: A Cyclic Post-Specialization System for Improving Out-of-Knowledge and Rare Word Representations (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrofitting is a technique used to move word vectors closer together or further apart in their space to reflect their relationships in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a system that uses two GANs to learn a one-to-one mapping between concepts and retrofitted counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs well on word-similarity benchmarks and a sentence simplification task. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
Sticker-TTS: Learn to Utilize Historical Experience with a Sticker-driven Test-Time Scaling Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models have exhibited strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, but current test-time scaling methods rely on redundant sampling and ignore historical experience utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time scaling framework that coordinates three collaborative LRMs to iteratively explore and refine solutions guided by historical attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses strong baselines on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME-24, AIME-25, and OlymMATH. |
Answer Convergence as a Signal for Early Stopping in Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a systematic study suggests that chain-of-thought prompting is unnecessary for producing correct answers. |
| Approach: | They propose three inference-time strategies to improve model efficiency by boosting end-of-reasoning signals and early stopping . they propose a method that learns when to stop based on internal activations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce token usage with little or no accuracy drop on natural questions . the proposed methods also reduce tokens by over 40% on naturalquestions . |
Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-main)
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Abbas Ghaddar, Yimeng Wu, Sunyam Bagga, Ahmad Rashid, Khalil Bibi, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Chao Xing, Yasheng Wang, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Phillippe Langlais
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are not well-explored and are not reproducible in the literature. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve existing Arabic language pre-trained language models using a more methodical approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on ALUE, a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. |
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but are vulnerable to harmful content and being exploited for malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures risk coverage across Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
FOCUS: A Fine-Grained Customer-Oriented Sentiment Dialogue Summarization Dataset for Chinese Customer Service (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook fine-grained sentiment dynamics expressed by customers . current methods often exhibit misalignment between aspects and sentiments . |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage approach to building an aspect-aware sentiment dataset . they use a fine-grained customer-oriented Chinese dialogUe summarization dataset based on this scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves faithfulness and interpretability of the proposed dataset. |
FEA-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Repository-Level Code Generation for Feature Implementation (2025.acl-long)
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Wei Li, Xin Zhang, Zhongxin Guo, Shaoguang Mao, Wen Luo, Guangyue Peng, Yangyu Huang, Houfeng Wang, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on standalone programming problems, such as HumanEval, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to evaluate their ability to perform incremental development within code repositories by collecting pull requests from 83 GitHub repositorias and using rule-based and intent-based filtering to construct task instances focused on new feature development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that large language models perform significantly worse in the FEA-Bench, highlighting considerable challenges in repository-level incremental code development. |
Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li, Hansi Zeng, Xin Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Xian Li, Jianshu Chen, Dakuo Wang, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns and provides tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
Enhancing Language Model with Unit Test Techniques for Efficient Regular Expression Generation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that generative language models lack functional correctness, which is a critical aspect of regular expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that takes functional correctness into account and transforms it into a differentiable gradient feedback using policy gradient techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been used in a regulatory scenario to ensure that all online content is free from non-compliant elements, thereby significantly reducing the workload of relevant personnel. |
HyperPELT: Unified Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning for Both Language and Vision-and-Language Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretraining and fine-tuning are the dominant paradigms in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient multitask learning framework that takes trainable hyper-embeddings and visual modality as input and outputs weights for different modules in a pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adds fewer trainable parameters in multi-task learning while achieving superior performances and transfer ability compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average. |
BERxiT: Early Exiting for BERT with Better Fine-Tuning and Extension to Regression (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to make exiting decisions are limited to classification tasks . large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT have brought performance gain but at the cost of heavy computational burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning strategy and a learning-to-exit module to accelerate BERT inference . they propose to make trade-offs between model quality and efficiency by early exiting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves early exiting for BERT, with better trade-offs . it can be combined with other acceleration methods, and the proposed strategy can be applied to regression tasks. |
Self-Evolution Learning for Mixup: Enhance Data Augmentation on Few-Shot Text Classification Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Haoqi Zheng, Qihuang Zhong, Liang Ding, Zhiliang Tian, Xin Niu, Changjian Wang, Dongsheng Li, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Text classification tasks often encounter few-shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolution learning (SE) based mixup approach for data augmentation in text classification which generates more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can generate more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training. |
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. |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning systems lack verifiable reward mechanisms for long-form question answering . current systems lack reliable long-term answers due to lack of factual content . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reinforced verifiable informativeness optimization . it defines informativeness as measurable and externally verifier objective for RL . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RioRAG achieves higher factual recall and faithfulness . the proposed framework is based on a framework that uses nugget-centric verification with cross-source checks . |
Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Wanjun Zhong, Xingshan Zeng, Jiahui Gao, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing techniques rely on memorizing updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Learning to Edit framework that equips LLMs with the ability to apply updated knowledge to input questions through a two-phase process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in knowledge editing tasks and compares it with four benchmarks and two LLM architectures. |
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. |
Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wenqing Tian, Zhipeng Chen, Yuhuan Wu, Jiahao Zhao, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train large language models to leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. |
Generate & Rank: A Multi-task Framework for Math Word Problems (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies formalize MWP as a generation task but mathematical expressions are prone to minor mistakes. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking task for math word problem (MWP) that learns from its own mistakes and distinguishes between correct and incorrect expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the classical Math23k dataset and is 7% higher than the state-of-the-art. |
ImaginE: An Imagination-Based Automatic Evaluation Metric for Natural Language Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for natural language generation rely on token-level or embedding-level comparisons with text references. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text-to-image generator to generate an image as the embodied imagination for the text snippet and compute the imagination similarity using contextual embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves existing evaluation metrics’ correlations with human similarity judgments in both reference-based and reference-free scenarios. |
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. |
MASFactory: A Graph-centric Framework for Orchestrating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems with Vibe Graphing (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language model-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-centric framework for orchestrating large language model-based multi-agent systems . they compile a user's natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compiles natural-language intent into an executable graph and then compile and executes it at runtime. |
Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique that encourages individuals to change behaviors through emphatic conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate more controllable dialogues with explainability by prompting LLMs to predict appropriate strategies as reasoning and utilizing these strategies to guide dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more controllable and explainable dialogues with a set of MI skills. |
AMR-Evol: Adaptive Modular Response Evolution Elicits Better Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models in Code Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | proprietary large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive module-based model that refines the direct response distillation process by modular decomposition and adaptive response evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline model and code generation methods on three popular benchmarks. |
IPS: In-Prompt Process Supervision for Short Video Content Moderation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) capture semantics of short video content but fail to account for policy-specific details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates In-prompt Process Supervision into MLLMs . they propose sequential reasoning over ancillary questions during fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | IPS outperforms baseline MLLMs on public and proprietary benchmarks . replacing human-annotated ancillary labels with MLML-generated ones results in performance degradation. |
LinkAlign: Scalable Schema Linking for Real-World Large-Scale Multi-Database Text-to-SQL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Text-to-SQL models fail to address schema linking problems in large-scale multi-database environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to enable non-expert users to retrieve data effortlessly . they highlight four core errors leading to schema linking failures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on all schema linking metrics. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
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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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| 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. |
Don’t Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deception detection and defenses are inadequate . Existing methods do not integrate with agent decision-making . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment. |
A Strategic Coordination Framework of Small LMs Matches Large LMs in Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from high computational costs and environmental inefficiency . smaller LMs are more accessible and sustainable, but their individual capabilities often fall short . a collaborative framework for small LM combines specialized roles to iterative refinement and quality control . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by a single large LM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by large LM. |
Learning to Maximize Mutual Information for Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation is a technique of transferring knowledge from large, complex models to smaller ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method utilizing chain-of-thought distillation to transfer knowledge from large, complex models to smaller ones by maximizing mutual information of the representation features of the two tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art knowledge distillation method on four datasets. |
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. |
Logit Arithmetic Elicits Long Reasoning Capabilities Without Training (2026.findings-acl)
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Yunxiang Zhang, Muhammad Khalifa, Lechen Zhang, Xin Liu, Ayoung Lee, Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Farima Fatahi Bayat, Lu Wang
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models exhibit long chain-of-thought reasoning with complex strategies such as backtracking and self-verification, yet, these capabilities typically require resource-intensive post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-time approach which transfers long chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities from a substantially smaller reasoning guider to a large non-reasoning target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over a model 21x smaller than the target model by 21.5% and 24.2% over the model. |
BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite the success of large language models, their performance in highly specialized domains remains unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose a biomedical tool-calling dataset designed for fine-tuning LLMs . the dataset contains 34 frequently used tools from the NCBI, Ensembl, and UniProt databases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms commercial LLMs on biomedical domains. |
Hyperbolic Capsule Networks for Multi-Label Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification of labels are limited by feature aggregation and encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hyperbolic capsule networks to capture fine-grained label information . they also propose a new routing method to adaptively adjust capsule number during routing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of multi-label classification on tail labels. |
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. |
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics. |
Middo: Model-Informed Dynamic Data Optimization for Enhanced LLM Fine-Tuning via Closed-Loop Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve data quality face limitations in static dataset curation that fail to adapt to evolving model capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving framework that uses model-aware data selection and context-preserving data refinement to improve LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality of seed data and boosts LLM’s performance with improving accuracy by 7.15% on average while maintaining the original dataset scale. |
HypoNLI: Exploring the Artificial Patterns of Hypothesis-only Bias in Natural Language Inference (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that for models trained on datasets for natural language inference (NLI), it is possible to make correct predictions by looking at the hypothesis while completely ignoring the premise. |
| Approach: | They propose to derive adversarial examples in terms of the hypothesis-only bias and explore eligible ways to mitigate such bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to mitigate the hypothesis-only bias by using down-sampling and adversarial training. |
Multimodal Language Models See Better When They Look Shallower (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haoran Chen, Junyan Lin, Xinghao Chen, Yue Fan, Jianfeng Dong, Xin Jin, Hui Su, Jinlan Fu, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal large language models extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature fusion method that strategically incorporates shallower layers . they propose MLLMs that extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms deep layers on fine-grained visual tasks . it is the first comprehensive study of visual layer selection for MLLMs . |
Gradually Excavating External Knowledge for Implicit Complex Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have gained attention for their human-comparable capabilities but they may not solve open-domain implicit questions due to out-of-date domain knowledge, one-shot generation and restricted comprehensiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradual knowledge excavation framework for open-domain complex question answering using extrinsic knowledge and historical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 78.17% accuracy with less than 6% parameters of its competitors, setting new SOTA in the 10B LLM class. |
LAMBADA: Backward Chaining for Automated Reasoning in Natural Language (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in automated reasoning with natural text suffer from a combinatorial explosion of the search space and high failure rates for problems requiring longer chains of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Backward Chaining algorithm that decomposes reasoning into four sub-modules and implements it by few-shot prompted LLM inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves sizable accuracy boosts over state-of-the-art forward reasoning methods on two challenging logical reasoning datasets. |
MoRE: A Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Adaptive Multi-Task Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, offering unprecedented performance across numerous tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new Mixture of Low-Rank Experts (MoRE) for multi-task PEFT to improve performance of LLMs with fewer parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over multiple tasks and no additional inference cost. |
Prompt Tuning Pushes Farther, Contrastive Learning Pulls Closer: A Two-Stage Approach to Mitigate Social Biases (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing debiasing techniques use Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) to balance the training corpus, but this technique slightly modifies the original corpus limiting the representation distance between different demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage debiasing model using Contrastive learning with Continuous Prompt Augmentation to mitigate social biases in PLMs’ encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in terms of debiasing performance while maintaining the language modeling capability of PLMs. |
Getting the Most out of Simile Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work ignores features other than surface strings and suffers from data hunger issue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use simile sentence classification and simile component extraction to find simile components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art systems and baselines. |
Batch IS NOT Heavy: Learning Word Representations From All Samples (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Stochastic Gradient Descent with negative sampling is the most prevalent approach to learn word representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses batch gradient learning to generate word representations from all training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms sampling-based methods on several benchmark tasks. |
TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Jinzhu Lu, Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Yuran Wang, Yong Ding, Yibo Cheung, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to preserve inference privacy are available as cloud services . however, the risk of privacy leakage remains, according to recent studies . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to preserve inference privacy by fusing token representations in the cloud. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves inference privacy without sacrificing performance on different scenarios. |
Fast Quiet-STaR: Thinking Without Thought Tokens (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance across a range of tasks, but further gains require more than scaling up model sizes or training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that gradually reduces the number of thought tokens . this method allows models to internalize more abstract reasoning processes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the benefits of token-level reasoning while reducing computational cost. |
EARA: Improving Biomedical Semantic Textual Similarity with Entity-Aligned Attention and Retrieval Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure semantic similarity between biomedical texts are inefficient due to too many biomedically-related entities. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-aligned, attention-based and retrieval-augmented PLM that aligns the same type of fine-grained entity information in each sentence pair with an entity alignment matrix with an auxiliary loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art on both in-domain and out-of domain datasets. |
Prompt-Based Length Controlled Generation with Multiple Control Types (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing length control methods focus on a simple control type of “equal to” a target length. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based method to achieve length controlled generation under different control types with high accuracy by using reinforcement learning and sample filtering with the reward signal given by rule-based reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of prompt-based length control on popular summarization datasets like CNNDM and NYT under multiple control types. |
ShortGPT: Layers in Large Language Models are More Redundant Than You Expect (2025.findings-acl)
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Xin Men, Mingyu Xu, Qingyu Zhang, Qianhao Yuan, Bingning Wang, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Weipeng Chen
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified significant redundancy in large language models . quantization and pruning are two methods that reduce computational resources . |
| Approach: | They propose simple pruning methods that prune redundant layers based on their BI scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning methods demonstrate superior performance over previous pruning methods. |
Learning “O” Helps for Learning More: Handling the Unlabeled Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER (2023.acl-long)
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Ruotian Ma, Xuanting Chen, Zhang Lin, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing Named Entity Recognition systems are typically trained on a large-scale dataset with predefined entity classes, then deployed for entity recognition on the test data without further adaptation or refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation learning method that adaptively detects entity clusters in "O" and two effective distance-based relabeling strategies for better learning the old classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 10.62% improvement over the baseline methods. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models typically adopt the cascade paradigm, preventing inter-modal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model with intrinsic cross-modal conversational abilities . they construct a cross-text speech instruction dataset and employ a three-stage training strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can follow cross-modal human instructions and handle multiple modalities with one model. |
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning-oriented LLMs lack a blind self-thinking paradigm . current models fail to recognize when their reasoning is underinformed or based on ambiguous user instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing. |
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional sentiment analysis methods focus on static reviews, failing to capture temporal relationship between user sentiment rating and textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic graph-based framework that addresses data sparsity in streaming reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces data sparsity by categorizing users into mid-tail, long-tail and extreme scenarios and incorporating LLM enhancements within a dynamic graph-based structure. |
MMAD:Multi-modal Movie Audio Description (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods of creating accessible movies rely on manual work, resulting in high costs and limited scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal movie audio description pipeline that generates narrations of information that is not accessible through unimodal hearing in movies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses existing baselines in performance on widely used datasets. |
R-PRM: Reasoning-Driven Process Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) output evaluation scores directly, limiting both learning efficiency and evaluation accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reasoning-Driven Process Reward Modeling (R-PRM) which activates inherent reasoning to enhance process-level evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on ProcessBench and PRMBench by 13.9 and 8.5 F1 scores. |
Improving Fine-grained Entity Typing with Entity Linking (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained entity typing require a large tag set and knowledge of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural model that uses context and information from entity linking to improve fine-grained entity typing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5% absolute strict accuracy improvement over the state of the art on two datasets. |
LVPruning: An Effective yet Simple Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning Approach for Multi-modal Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur significant computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided vision token pruning method that can be integrated into existing MLLMs with minimal architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces vision tokens by 90% and preserves model performance. |
Latent Part-of-Speech Sequences for Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning target side syntactic structure are greedy and only allow them to explore a limited portion of the latent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a new latent variable model, LaSyn, that captures the co-dependence between syntax and semantics while allowing for effective inference over the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the co-dependence between syntax and semantics while allowing for efficient inference over the latent space. |
Hypernetwork-Assisted Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Meta-Knowledge Distillation for Domain Knowledge Disentanglement (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on domain adaptation for text summarization fails to account for the huge gap between dialogue and general articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypernetwork-assisted encoder-decoder architecture with parameter-efficient fine-tuning to disentangle domain-invariant knowledge from source domains while learning specific knowledge of the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can disentangle domain-invariant knowledge from source domains while learning specific knowledge of the target domain. |
Showing Your Work Doesn’t Always Work (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | countless experimental papers lack empirical rigor, disregarding necessities such as statistical significance tests and computational environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to report the expected validation effectiveness of the best-tuned model with respect to the computational budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model favors negative errors and yields poor bootstrapped confidence intervals, the authors argue . they find that the proposed model is biased and uses error-prone assumptions . |
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (P19-3)
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| Challenge: | NeuralClassifier is a toolkit for hierarchical multi-label text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for neural hierarchical multi-label text classification . they use a variety of text encoders to implement the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with reported results in the literature. |
MEIT: Multimodal Electrocardiogram Instruction Tuning on Large Language Models for Report Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhongwei Wan, Che Liu, Xin Wang, Chaofan Tao, Hui Shen, Jing Xiong, Rossella Arcucci, Huaxiu Yao, Mi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on classifying cardiac conditions using ECG data but have overlooked ECG report generation, which is time-consuming and requires clinical expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multimodal ECG Instruction Tuning framework that extends the capability of large language models (LLMs) for the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source LLMs and LLM backbones across two large-scale ECG datasets. |
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. |
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. |
Step Feasibility-Aware and Error-Correctable Entailment Tree Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating entailment trees suffer from false feasible steps, resulting in error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative entailment tree generation framework with step feasibility perception and state error handling mechanisms to enhance the interpretability of QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the interpretation of QA systems by demonstrating that it is feasible to choose steps that are false feasible and error propagating. |
Inductive Relation Prediction with Logical Reasoning Using Contrastive Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation prediction in knowledge graphs (KGs) are limited by the inductive setting because entities in training process are finite. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional network-based model LogCo with logical reasoning by contrastive representations that extracts subgraphs and relational paths between two entities to supply the entity-independence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on twelve inductive datasets. |
From Objectives to Questions: A Planning-based Framework for Educational Mathematical Question Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional generation methods focus primarily on textual quality, but they fail to meet complex, multifaceted educational requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automatic generating high-quality mathematical problems that align with educational objectives using a dataset of 16k mathematical questions with multi-dimensional educational objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generating high-quality mathematical questions that meet multi-dimensional educational objectives. |
BehaviorSFT: Behavioral Token Conditioning for Health Agents Across the Proactivity Spectrum (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yubin Kim, Zhiyuan Hu, Hyewon Jeong, Eugene W Park, Shuyue Stella Li, Chanwoo Park, Shiyun Xiong, MingYu Lu, Hyeonhoon Lee, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff, Cynthia Breazeal, Samir Tulebaev, Hae Won Park
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with proactive engagement, authors say . a blind clinical evaluation confirmed that trained agents exhibit more realistic clinical behavior . |
| Approach: | They propose a training strategy using behavioral tokens to explicitly condition LLMs for dynamic behavioral selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy boosts performance on both benchmarks. |
Truth or Sophistry? LoFa: A Benchmark for LLM Robustness Against Logical Fallacies (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has focused on the ability of Large Language Models to **identify** or **classify** fallacies, but their robustness against these fallacias in persuasive contexts remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to assess LLM robustness against fallacies by pairing factual questions with fallacious arguments and developing a multi-round debate framework to assess model resilience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric disentangles robustness from a model’s knowledge limitations and demonstrates unique vulnerability profiles across models. |
From Generalist to Specialist: A Survey of Large Language Models for Chemistry (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pretraining of LLMs on extensive web-based texts are insufficient for advanced scientific discovery, especially in chemistry. |
| Approach: | They outline methodologies for incorporating domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information into LLMs and conceptualize chemistry LLM agents using chemistry tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information and are capable of accelerating scientific research. |
Curriculum Prompt Learning with Self-Training for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to summarize dialogues are difficult due to insufficient training data and low information density. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum-based prompt learning method with self-training that gradually increases the degree of prompt perturbation, improving dialogue understanding and modeling capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the AMI and ICSI datasets and human evaluations show it is superior in the quality of the summary generation. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Verification and Refinement of Natural Language Explanations through LLM-Symbolic Theorem Proving (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing the validity of explanations for NLI are time-consuming and prone to logical errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Large Language Models and Theorem Provers to verify and refine natural language explanations through crowd-sourcing . they propose to use TPs to generate and formalise explanatory sentences and suggest potential inference strategies for NLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates and formalises explanatory sentences and suggests potential inference strategies for NLI. |
Enhanced Language Model Truthfulness with Learnable Intervention and Uncertainty Expression (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate long-form and coherent text, yet they often hallucinate facts, which undermines their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Learnable Intervention method for Truthfulness Optimization that automatically identifies the optimal intervention intensity tailored to each query context. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple LLMs and question-answering datasets show that LITO improves truthfulness while preserving task accuracy. |
Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems. |
AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Tianqing Fang, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs are deficient in abstract ability, and how to improve it remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework AbsInstruct to enhance LLMs’ abstract ability through instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability with strong generalization performance while maintaining their general instruction-following abilities. |
Exploiting BERT for End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (D19-55)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on ABSA use a sequence tagging problem to extract aspect-specific opinion words from the sentence given the aspect. |
| Approach: | They build a series of simple yet insightful neural baselines to deal with E2E-ABSA task using contextualized embeddings from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models even with a simple linear classification layer. |
Semi-Structured Chain-of-Thought: Integrating Multiple Sources of Knowledge for Improved Language Model Reasoning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods rely on only one or two of these sources, or require repeatedly invoking large language models to generate similar or identical content. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-structured prompting approach that integrates parametric memory with unstructured knowledge from text documents and structured knowledge from knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompting method surpasses existing prompting methods even exceeding those that require fine-tuning on open-domain multi-hop question answering datasets. |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
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Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yanghao Li, Yuepeng Fu, Siyang Deng, Qinyu Luo, Cheng Qian, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Xiaojiang Liu
| Challenge: | Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks. |
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zixuan Dong, Baoyun Peng, Yufei Wang, Jia Fu, Xiaodong Wang, Xin Zhou, Yongxue Shan, Kangchen Zhu, Weiguo Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
Generating Commonsense Counterfactuals for Stable Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction struggle to identify causal terms under the invariant entity constraint. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate commonsense counterfactuals for stable relation extraction by using a knowledge base WordNet and a constituency parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances the stability of relation extraction models. |
MANBench: Is Your Multimodal Model Smarter than Human? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been gaining popularity in multimodal tasks . a bilingual benchmark is available for MLLM users to evaluate their multimodal capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual multimodal ability norms benchmark that measures multimodality across nine tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared human performance against state-of-the-art MLLMs. |
RecMem: Recurrence-based Memory Consolidation for Efficient and Effective Long-Running LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory systems invoke LLMs to extract episodic and semantic memory, and this leads to substantial token consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that stores incoming interactions in a subconscious memory layer and encodes them using lightweight embedding models for retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RecMem reduces the memory construction token cost of three SOTA memory systems by up to 87% while exceeding their accuracy. |
MEDA: Dynamic KV Cache Allocation for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require substantial computational resources as their multimodal Key-Value (KV) cache grows with increasing input lengths, challenging memory and time efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic multimodal KV cache allocation strategy that dynamically allocating KV size based on attention entropy to better adapt to multimodal interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves up to 72% KV cache memory reduction and 2.82 faster decoding speeds while maintaining or enhancing performance on various multimodal tasks in a long context. |
TAeKD: Teacher Assistant Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Closed-Source Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have produced impressive results in the field of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). |
| Approach: | They propose a Teacher Assistant enhanced Knowledge Distillation method to augment knowledge transfer capacity from closed-source MNMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art KD methods on both WMT22 and FLORES-101 test sets. |
Active Listening: Personalized Question Generation in Open-Domain Social Conversation with User Model Based Prompting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that users of conversational systems want a more personalized experience . Question Generation tasks focus on factual questions from textual excerpts . |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that conversational systems want a more personalized experience . they use large language models capable of casual conversation to generate PQs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces the most natural and engaging responses against competing models. |
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster. |
LSSF: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models through Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusion (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fine-tuning, which inadvertently leads to the increased complexity and computational resources required. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety re-alignment framework with Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusison that exploits low-rank safety characteristics of LLMs by constructing a low-ranked projection matrix to extract the principal components of safety vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits low-rank safety subspace of the LLMs and is stable during fine-tuning process and is isolated from the model’s general capabilities. |
JointGT: Graph-Text Joint Representation Learning for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models for knowledgegraph-to-text generation ignore graph structure during encoding and lack elaborate pre-training tasks to explicitly model graph-text alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-text joint representation learning model called JointGT which incorporates a structure-aware semantic aggregation module into each Transformer layer to preserve the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various KG-to-text datasets. |
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. |
A Sequential Multi-Stage Approach for Code Vulnerability Detection via Confidence- and Collaboration-based Decision Making (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across diverse domains, but their application to code vulnerability detection raises significant concerns regarding efficiency, scalability and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential multi-stage approach via confidence- and collaboration-based decision making via a three-stage sequential classification framework with a single agent, retrieval-augmented generation with external examples, and multi-agent reasoning enhanced with RAG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves code vulnerability detection performance on a benchmark dataset and a low-resource language. |
Construction of Paired Knowledge Graph - Text Datasets Informed by Cyclic Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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Ali Mousavi, Xin Zhan, He Bai, Peng Shi, Theodoros Rekatsinas, Benjamin Han, Yunyao Li, Jeffrey Pound, Joshua M. Susskind, Natalie Schluter, Ihab F. Ilyas, Navdeep Jaitly
| Challenge: | Prior studies have shown that sequence-to-sequence models learn to hallucinate when the conditioning data has poor correlation with the sequence being produced. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that pairs Knowledge Graphs (KG) and text together and compare their results to a cyclic evaluation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on cyclic generation of KGs than on KG-T, but less well on synchronization of KTs. |
STANKER: Stacking Network based on Level-grained Attention-masked BERT for Rumor Detection on Social Media (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text classification are limited in performance, resulting in poor rumor detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese microblogs to detect rumors using pre-trained language models and auxiliary features such as comments to mask co-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on Weibo20 and three existing social media datasets. |
Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering (2026.acl-long)
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Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to overcome object hallucination are limited . Existing mitigations include costly retraining and a training-free inference framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improves accuracy by 5.8% on POPE. |
DPDV: Dual-Pathway and Dual-View Representation Learning for Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-Video Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-based person anomaly search fail to address the pose-semantic gap . asymmetric cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a video retrieval framework that partitions visual features into two categories based on relevance to the text query and performs effective interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves leading retrieval performance on five benchmark datasets. |
To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to inference-time alignment are expensive and only offer guidances during output generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models’ knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of inference-time alignment interventions and improves performance on challenging model pairs. |
Complex Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Fast Fourier Transform (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the choice of space for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings has significant effects on the performance of KG completion tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Fourier transform to convert between real and complex hyperbolic space to capture hierarchical patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the baseline models for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings. |
LibVulnWatch: A Deep Assessment Agent System and Leaderboard for Uncovering Hidden Vulnerabilities in Open-Source AI Libraries (2025.acl-srw)
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Zekun Wu, Seonglae Cho, Umar Mohammed, Cristian Enrique Munoz Villalobos, Kleyton Da Costa, Xin Guan, Theo King, Ze Wang, Emre Kazim, Adriano Koshiyama
| Challenge: | Open-source AI libraries present significant, underexamined risks spanning security, licensing, maintenance, supply chain integrity, and regulatory compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that leverages large language models and agentic workflows to perform deep, evidence-based evaluations of open-source AI libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system covers up to 88% of OpenSSF Scorecard checks and uncovers 19 additional risks per library. |
Enhancing Scalability of Pre-trained Language Models via Efficient Parameter Sharing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to scale pre-trained language models to a deeper model depth share all parameters or use extra blocks. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient approach to scaling pre-trained language models to a deeper model depth using matrix product operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales pre-trained language models to a deeper model depth by 4x and achieves 0.1 points higher than BERT-large for GLUE score. |
Experience-Driven Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompts and Heuristics for Autonomous Algorithm Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Combinatorial optimization has long been dominated by manually engineered heuristics, which require substantial expert intuition and implementation overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples an island migration model with elite selection to maintain population diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior accuracy on the Traveling Salesman and Bin Packing Problems. |
Continual Pre-training of Language Models for Math Problem Understanding with Syntax-Aware Memory Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a fundamental challenge in modeling math problems is how to fuse semantics of textual description and formulas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to continually pre-train language models for improving understanding of math problems with syntax-aware memory networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms competitive baselines on four math tasks. |
TARN-VIST: Topic Aware Reinforcement Network for Visual Storytelling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual storytelling ignore latent topic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-aware reinforcement network for VIsual StoryTelling that takes topic information into account to generate a coherent story. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms most of the competing models across multiple evaluation metrics. |
Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Xin Zhang, Xiao Liu, Yangyu Huang, Jianwen Luo, Yizhen Zhang, Zuchao Li, Ruihang Chu, Yujiu Yang, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning focus on unit test feedback to construct preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Preference Learning improves on BigCodeBench and BigCodeBind tasks. |
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a multi-lingual approach to training dialog systems is expensive and tedious, but it can be useful for cross-lingual support. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate data for multiple languages and train a multi-lingual dialog system for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the expensive human annotation and achieves promising results. |
Learning Hierarchy-Aware Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Representing Relations as 3D Rotations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models fail to model semantic hierarchies . Existing methods fail to understand the semantic hierarchies of knowledge graphs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model which embeds entities as pure quaternions and constrains the modulus of entities to make them have hierarchical distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, composition, multiple relation patterns and learn semantic hierarchies simultaneously. |
WebQuality: A Large-scale Multi-modal Web Page Quality Assessment Dataset with Multiple Scoring Dimensions (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on web page quality assessment neglect the aspect of web page content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset for web page quality assessment . the dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions and incorporates elements such as HTML+CSS, text, and visual screenshot. |
Pre-training Language Models with Deterministic Factual Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Pre-trained Language Models fail to capture factual knowledge robustly. |
| Approach: | They propose to let PLMs learn the deterministic relationship between context and masked content to improve their ability to capture factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve accuracy and consistency of factual knowledge capturing and boost performance of other knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Navigation as Attackers Wish? Towards Building Robust Embodied Agents under Federated Learning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Towards Byzantine-robust federated embodied agent learning, we study the attack and defense for the task of vision-and-language navigation (VLN) |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to defend against a navigation-and-language navigation attack using navigation as wish (NAW) the method provides the server with a 'prompt' of the vision-and language alignment variance between benign and malicious clients so they can be distinguished during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art defense methods on two VLN datasets. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Mengcheng Fang, Tingwen Liu, Haiyang Yu, Zhongkai Hu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE are task-specific, resulting in specialized and isolated approaches for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve task-specific knowledge from pretrained language models to enhance universal IE by using a Meta-Pretraining Algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art on 4 IE tasks, 12 datasets under fully-supervised, low-resource and few-shot scenarios. |
DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT are notorious for being slow in both training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to accelerate BERT inference by inserting extra classification layers between each transformer layer of BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method saves up to 40% inference time with minimal degradation in model quality. |
A Comparison of Strategies for Source-Free Domain Adaptation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on domain adaptation without access to training data is limited due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They compare active learning, self-training, and data augmentation strategies for source-free domain adaptation with a shared task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms yield consistent gains across all SemEval 2021 Task 10 tasks and domains, but they are unreliable for source-free domain adaptation. |
TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT are computationally expensive and limited to resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the other methods on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 14.9x smaller. |
PEGRL: Improving Machine Translation by Post-Editing Guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong promise for LLM-based machine translation . however, translation-oriented RL remains challenged by high-variance policy gradients induced by Monte Carlo baselines and large trajectory space that favors global exploration over fine-grained local optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that uses post-editing as an auxiliary task to stabilize training and guide overall optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports global exploration and fine-grained optimization while supporting global exploration. |
Are Gender-Neutral Queries Really Gender-Neutral? Mitigating Gender Bias in Image Search (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K benchmarks show that our methods significantly reduce the gender bias in image search models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fair sampling method and a feature clipping method to debias image search models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce gender bias in image search models on MS-COCO and Flickr30K benchmarks. |
MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive progress in mathematical problem-solving . current approaches to enhance mathematical reasoning focus on instance-level modifications . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances mathematical reasoning through cross-problem instruction synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts mathematical reasoning by 18.0 points while maintaining high data efficiency. |
JurisBench: A Deep Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models in Professional Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Ziang Chen, Guannan Li, Fanlin Ji, Yipeng Kang, Jiaqi Li, Muhan Zhang, Yangtao Zhang, Li Tianjiao, Jiannan Wang, Xin Guo, Song-Chun Zhu, Bin Ling
| Challenge: | Existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated tasks or exam-style questions, failing to capture the procedural interdependencies and adjudicative rigor inherent in professional practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical, depth-oriented, domain-specific benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chinese civil litigation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that large language models exhibit an "illusion of competence" the results highlight a critical gap between fluent linguistic output and judicial reliability . |
Pre-training Distillation for Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model for model compression. |
| Approach: | They extend knowledge distillation to the pre-training phase of large language models . they first conduct an experiment using a teacher LLM to distill a 1.9B student LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to distill a 1.9B student model using a teacher LLM. |
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. |
Few-Shot Event Detection with Prototypical Amortized Conditional Random Field (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event detection ignore the trigger discrepancy and cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model which converts a few-shot tagging problem into a single-shot model by using a Gaussian distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing identifythen-classify models on a few-shot tagging problem with a double-part taging scheme. |
Transformer-Based Temporal Information Extraction and Application: A Review (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Temporal information extraction (IE) aims to extract structured temporal information from unstructured text, thereby uncovering the implicit timelines within. |
| Approach: | They summarize and analyze the work using Transformers to highlight potential future directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is applied across healthcare, newswire, and intelligence analysis domains. |
NaviMaster: Learning a Unified Policy for GUI and Embodied Navigation Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and embodied navigation have driven progress, yet these domains have largely evolved in isolation, with disparate datasets and training paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-target trajectory collection pipeline that generates trajectories for GUI and embodied tasks using a single formulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art agents in GUI navigation, spatial affordance prediction, and embodied navigation. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
LightEA: A Scalable, Robust, and Interpretable Entity Alignment Framework via Three-view Label Propagation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing EA methods inherit the inborn defects from their neural network lineage: poor interpretability and weak scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-free EA framework that can find equivalent entity pairs between KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has impressive scalability, robustness, and interpretability. |
Schema-adaptable Knowledge Graph Construction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) tasks rely on static information extraction with a closed set of pre-defined schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a static knowledge Graph Construction task that extracts entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods but still has room for improvement . it can extract entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without re-training . |
Improving Explainable Fact-Checking with Claim-Evidence Correlations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking systems that employ large language models fail to reveal reasoning principles behind their decision-making for the claim verdict. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based fact-checking system that simulates human reasoning principles . they propose a test set to evaluate the CorXFact system in real-world and closed-domain scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms four strong fact-checking baselines in claim authenticity prediction and verdict explanation. |
Collaborative Generative AI: Integrating GPT-k for Efficient Editing in Text-to-Image Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that GPT-k models focus more on inserting modifiers than predicting spontaneous changes in the primary subject matter. |
| Approach: | They compare the common edits made by humans and GPT-k models to examine their performance in prompting T2I. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve the prompt editing process by 20-30%, the authors show . they show that humans tend to replace words and phrases with modifiers . |
MERIT: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to time series representation learning are time-consuming and expert-dependent, which are difficult to generalize across different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language model agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and a framework to integrate three LLM agents to collaboratively generate positive views for time series data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates large language model (LLM) agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and compares it with state-of-the-art baselines on multiple time series datasets. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
Improving the Robustness of Summarization Systems with Dual Augmentation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that state-of-the-art summarization models have a significant decrease in performance on adversarial and noisy test sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a SummAttacker approach to generate adversarial samples based on pre-trained language models that can generate word-level synonym substitution and noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on noisy, attacked, and clean datasets than baseline models and is more robust on noisy and attacked datasets. |
MMChat: Multi-Modal Chat Dataset on Social Media (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is important for developing engaging dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus that contains image-grounded dialogues from real conversations on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle sparsity issues in dialogue generation tasks by incorporating image features. |
Data Augmentation with Adversarial Training for Cross-Lingual NLI (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train cross-lingual models with labeled data are subpar, resulting in subpar results. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation strategy that enriches data to reflect more diversity in a semantically faithful way and leverages adversarial training regimens to achieve greater robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual inference by leveraging the data to reflect more diversity in a semantically faithful way. |
AHA: Aligning Large Audio-Language Models for Reasoning Hallucinations via Counterfactual Hard Negatives (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanxi Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang, Xin Li, Peijie Qiu, Hao Wang, Xuanzhao Dong, Yujian Xiong, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yalin Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio-Language Models suffer from hallucinations, e.g., generating text not grounded in the audio input. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address hallucination problems in large audio-language models . they use a preference dataset to test the model's accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the latest SOTA methods in terms of performance and generalization. |
Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based method that learns source prompts and transfers them as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to perform text generation tasks in a transferable setting. |
SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ke Lin, Jiahao Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Wentao Zhang, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most. |
GiFT: Gibbs Fine-Tuning for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with synthetic data is a prevalent practice in code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune large language models with code drawn from a conditional distribution, conditioned on a specific seed description. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on four datasets and shows that it can be used to fine-tune LLMs with code derived from the marginal distribution. |
A Helping Hand: Transfer Learning for Deep Sentiment Analysis (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep neural models for sentiment polarity classification require large amounts of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to feed generic cues into the training process of deep convolutional neural networks for sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves sentiment polarity classification on a range of datasets in seven languages. |
Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Jiang, Xin Yang, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Zheming Yuan, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang, Haopeng Zhang
| 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. |
Revitalizing Black-Box Interpretability: Actionable Interpretability for LLMs via Proxy Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Applying model-agnostic explanations to Large Language Models is hindered by prohibitive computational costs rendering them dormant for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget-friendly proxy framework that leverages efficient models to approximate the decision boundaries of expensive Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 90% fidelity with only 9.5% of the oracle’s cost and is open-source to facilitate future research. |
CAFE: Retrieval Head-based Coarse-to-Fine Information Seeking to Enhance Multi-Document QA Capability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with retrieval and reasoning in long context inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine method to enhance multi-document question-answering capacities by removing background and distracting documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAFE outperforms baseline methods on multiple documents. |
REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs) lack internal parametric knowledge, resulting in misusing external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach that provides LLMs with potentially relevant documents through a module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four open-domain QA tasks. |
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. |
The Impact of Language Mixing on Bilingual LLM Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show multilingual speakers intentionally switch languages during reasoning . enforcing monolingual decoding reduces accuracy by 5.6 percentage points . |
| Approach: | They find that multilingual speakers intentionally switch languages during reasoning . enforcing monolingual decoding reduces accuracy by 5.6 percentage points . authors suggest that language mixing is not merely a byproduct of multilingual training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to predict whether a language switch would benefit or harm reasoning. |
mPMR: A Multilingual Pre-trained Machine Reader at Scale (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing mPLMs only transfer NLU capability from source to target languages . mPMR allows direct inheritance of multilingual NLU capabilities to downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to guide multilingual pre-trained language models to perform natural language understanding in multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | mPMR enables multilingual pre-trained language models to perform natural language understanding (NLU) in multiple languages. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
Neuron Empirical Gradient: Discovering and Quantifying Neurons’ Global Linear Controllability (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that feed-forward neurons in pre-trained language models (PLMs) can encode factual knowledge, but current methods are costly and lack the link between activations and outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to compute a global linear relationship between neuron activations and outputs using a knowledge probing dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the neural empirical gradient to capture changes in neuron activations and model outputs. |
Eliciting Motivational Interviewing Skill Codes in Psychotherapy with LLMs: A Bilingual Dataset and Analytical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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Xin Sun, Jiahuan Pei, Jan de Wit, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Emiel Krahmer, Jos T.P. Dobber, Jos A. Bosch
| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is an essential, directive, client-centered counseling technique. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual dataset of MI conversations in English and Dutch . they propose an approach to elicit MISC expertise from Large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields results aligned with expert annotations and maintains consistent performance across languages. |
ToolFlow: Boosting LLM Tool-Calling Through Natural and Coherent Dialogue Synthesis (2025.naacl-long)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be enhanced by using supervised fine-tuning . however, access to fine-timing data can be limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph-based Sampling strategy and a Planned-generation strategy to enhance the coherence between dialogues by using 8,000 synthetic dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves tool-calling performance comparable to or surpassing GPT-4 while maintaining strong general capabilities. |
SSCR: Iterative Language-Based Image Editing via Self-Supervised Counterfactual Reasoning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Iterative language-based image editing (ILBIE) tasks follow iterative instructions to edit images step by step. data scarcity makes learning the association between vision and language challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates counterfactual thinking to overcome data scarcity by combining out-of-distribution instructions with previous images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the correctness of ILBIE on two IBLIE datasets, even with only 50% of the training data. |
FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Wanjun Zhong, Liangyou Li, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models that adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can follow instructions with more constraints, and is deemed to have better instruction-following ability. |
Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of complex logical hypothesis generation to generate a complex logique hypothesis that can explain a set of observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates logical hypotheses closer to the reference hypothesis, but not better on unseen observations. |
R-Search: Empowering LLM Reasoning with Search via Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Qingfei Zhao, Ruobing Wang, Dingling Xu, Daren Zha, Ma Bowen, Zhichun Wang, Shijie Jia, Limin Liu, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-step and long-chain reasoning, but extending their reasoning capabilities to encompass deep interactions with search remains a non-trivial challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Reasoning–Search integration that integrates multi-reward signals to optimize the reasoning–search interaction trajectories. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on seven datasets show that R-Search significantly outperforms mainstream RAG baselines. |
Battling against Tough Resister: Strategy Planning with Adversarial Game for Non-collaborative Dialogues (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Non-collaborative dialogue involves two participants with conflicting interests engaging in multiround dialogue to achieve their own goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a Game-based Adversarial self-play InterActive training paradigm which constructs an adversarial two-player (a persuader and a resister) zero-sum game and guides the game to approximate Nash Equilibrium (NE) via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets. |
VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhaowei Liu, Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Lingfeng Zeng, Fangqi Lou, Jinyi Niu, Mengping Li, Qi Qi, Jiahuan Li, Wei Zhang, Yinglong Wang, Weige Cai, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on text comprehension, but MLLMs lack the ability to integrate visual data over financial visuals. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 21 state-of-the-art multimodal large language models in a zero-shot setting . they use an annotated question–answer pair from eight common financial image modalities . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing models but trailed financial experts by 14 percentage points. |
EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for leveraging background knowledge of narratives are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to ground free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for narrative reasoning . their framework is based on a set of probabilistic probabilistic models that are grounded in the real world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while providing interpretable evidence. |
CodeAttack: Revealing Safety Generalization Challenges of Large Language Models via Code Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but can be misused for harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms natural language inputs into code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the safety guardrails of all models more than 80% of the time. |
SAGED: A Holistic Bias-Benchmarking Pipeline for Language Models with Customisable Fairness Calibration (2025.coling-main)
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Xin Guan, Nate Demchak, Saloni Gupta, Ze Wang, Ediz Ertekin Jr., Adriano Koshiyama, Emre Kazim, Zekun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models fail to detect bias due to limited scope, contamination, and lack of a fairness baseline. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking pipeline to detect biases in large language models . they use metrics for max disparity, impact ratio, and bias concentration to analyze disparity . |
| Outcome: | SAGED(bias) is the first holistic benchmarking pipeline to address biases in large language models. |
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 . |
Knowing When to Quit: Diagnosing and Training LLMs to Abort Futile Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate costly yet semantically void reasoning on beyond-capability tasks . the dominant failure mode is specious reasoning, superficially valid outputs with subtle hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-aligned reinforcement learning approach that aligns model behavior with capability boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces futile reasoning while maintaining performance across tasks. |
Retrofitting Multilingual Sentence Embeddings with Abstract Meaning Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multilingual sentence embeddings focus on cross-lingual semantic textual similarity and transfer tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve existing multilingual sentence embeddings with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) . they compare existing multi-lingual sentence embedded with AMR and improve their versions by reducing the surface variations across different languages and expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embeddings on transfer tasks and semantic textual similarity tests. |
HyperFM: Fact-Centric Multimodal Fusion for Link Prediction over Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing link prediction techniques focus on learning the complex relationships between entities and relations while ignoring the multimodal information. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-centric fusion technique that captures complex interactions between different data modalities while accommodating the hyper-relational structure of the KG in a facts-centric manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves on two real-world KG datasets by 6.0-6.8% over baselines. |
Paraphrase Generation with Deep Reinforcement Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation is an important but challenging task in natural language processing . traditional symbolic approaches to paraphrase generation include rule-based methods, thesaurus-based approaches and statistical machine translation (SMT) |
| Approach: | They propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to automatic paraphrase generation . they propose supervised learning and reinforcement learning for evaluators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in paraphrase generation on two datasets. |
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. |
Tracing Multilingual Knowledge Acquisition Dynamics in Domain Adaptation: A Case Study of Biomedical Adaptation (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual domain adaptation (ML-DA) enables large language models to acquire domain knowledge across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive evaluation method that constructs multiple-choice QA datasets from the same bilingual domain corpus used for training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method constructs multiple-choice QA datasets from the same bilingual domain corpus used for training, thereby enabling direct analysis of multilingual knowledge acquisition. |
Enabling Multimodal Generation on CLIP via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training models are powerful in multimodal classification and retrieval tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment a vision-language pre-training model with a textual pre-trained language model . the model achieves 44.5% zero-shot accuracy on multimodal generation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 44.5% zero-shot accuracy on open-ended visual question answering and image captioning tasks. |
SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-hop knowledge graph reasoning suffer from slow and poor convergence . a transformer model can be used to learn and predict in an end-to-end fashion, giving faster convergence compared to previous methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a Sequence-to-sequence based multi-hop reasoning framework . it uses an encoder-decoder transformer structure to translate the query to a path . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn and predict in an end-to-end fashion, which gives better and faster convergence. |
THCM-CAL: Temporal-Hierarchical Causal Modelling with Conformal Calibration for Clinical Risk Prediction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to risk prediction from EHRs handle structured diagnostic codes and unstructured narrative notes separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal-Hierarchical Causal Model with Conformal Calibration . they construct a multimodal causal graph where nodes represent clinical entities from two modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers three clinically grounded interactions from textual propositions and ICD codes mapped to textual descriptions. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Critical Representation Fine-tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Chenxi Huang, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Binbin Lin, Sinan Fan, Yue Xin, Deng Cai, Chen Shen, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) is a proposed method for improving parameter efficiency . however, it yields suboptimal performance, as fixed-position representations have uncertain impact on outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes critical representations in a low-rank linear subspace while freezing the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy of LLaMA-2-7B and ReFT by 18.2 and 3.8 on GSM8K. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |
InteGround: On the Evaluation of Verification and Retrieval Planning in Integrative Grounding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing grounding approaches work well for simple queries, but many real-world information needs require synthesizing multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Approach: | They introduce "integrative grounding" to evaluate the ability to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is robust to redundant evidence, but rationalizes using internal knowledge when information is incomplete. |
TMID: A Comprehensive Real-world Dataset for Trademark Infringement Detection in E-Commerce (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Annually, e-commerce platforms incur substantial financial losses due to trademark infringements. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to detect trademark infringement in merchant registrations . they use legal rules and contextual information from Alipay to gather contextual information with annotations from legal experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is sourced from Alipay, one of the world’s largest e-commerce and digital payment platforms. |
Chain-of-Probe: Examining the Necessity and Accuracy of CoT Step-by-Step (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to probe changes in confidence during the model’s reasoning and prioritize answers with correct reasoning among multiple candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals that in a significant number of question-answer cases, CoT appears to be unnecessary and this necessity correlates with the simplicity of the task, defined by the reasoning steps required. |
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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Dayu Yang, Tianyang Liu, Daoan Zhang, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, Julian McAuley
| 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. |
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks. |
On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Ziyu Zhu, Xintong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Zhongzhi Luan, Bo Dai, Zhenliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Adapting general multimodal large language models to specific domains is important for practical applications. |
| Approach: | They investigate domain adaptation of multimodal large language models via post-training . they develop a generate-then-filter pipeline that curates diverse visual instruction tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in domain adaptation by combining data from open-source models with training pipelines. |
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)
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Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks. |
pFedRAG: A Personalized Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation System with Depth-Adaptive Tiered Embedding Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Personalized Federated RAG framework enables efficient collaborative fine-tuning of embedding models . depth-adaptive tieered Embedding (DATE) architecture is tailored for local data and training results of each client. |
| Approach: | a new Personalized Federated RAG framework is proposed for large language models . the framework enables efficient collaborative fine-tuning of embedding models based on common knowledge . |
| Outcome: | a novel Personalized Federated RAG framework is proposed for large language models . the framework enables efficient collaborative fine-tuning of embedding models based on common knowledge . |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering system lack large-scale question matching corpora . lack of large-sized question matching results in problem solving . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus which is released to the public . they use a search engine to collect large-sized question pairs related to high-frequency words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrasing. |
Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on Aspect-based sentiment analysis ignores the rich label semantics of ABSA. |
| Approach: | They propose to tackle various ABSA tasks in a unified generative framework . they propose to use annotation-style and extraction-style modeling to enable training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four ABSA tasks across multiple benchmark datasets. |
Interpretable Charge Predictions for Criminal Cases: Learning to Generate Court Views from Fact Descriptions (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on court view generation from fact descriptions has improved the working efficiency of legal assistant systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to decode court views conditioned on encoded charge labels from the fact description in a criminal case to improve interpretability of charge prediction systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate court views conditioned on encoded charge labels. |
TSDG: Content-aware Neural Response Generation with Two-stage Decoding Process (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that generative models often use a single decoder to generate a complete response at a stroke. |
| Approach: | They propose a content-aware model with two-stage decoding process to separate content words from function words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models in automatic and human evaluation on two datasets. |
Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate for conversational recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation approach based on LLMs that harnesses LLM-based user simulators to evaluate ChatGPT's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation approach can simulate various system-user interaction scenarios. |
ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have excellent performance in evaluation benchmarks, but struggle in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs . they model chain- of-thoughting reasoning as multi-turn conversations to utilize tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on complex reasoning tasks. |
Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities demonstrated by LLMs, the understanding of how these abilities develop and function remains nascent. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel detection method to pinpoint language-specific neurons within LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating these neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can “steer” the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. |
Conversational Education at Scale: A Multi-LLM Agent Workflow for Procedural Learning and Pedagogic Quality Assessment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large language models lacks scalability and assesses pedagogic quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent workflow leveraging large language models to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. |
Incorporating Hierarchy into Text Encoder: a Contrastive Learning Approach for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode text and label hierarchy separately and mix their representations for classification, where the hierarchy remains unchanged for all input text. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed hierarchy into a text encoder by combining input and output data to generate a hierarchy-aware representation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models suffer from poor performance when applied to short text contents due to the limited length of a single topic. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural short text topic model that augments reconstruction labels with k-nearest documents to complement relevant but unobserved words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on multiple public short-text datasets and can derive high-quality topics and document representations. |
Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to in-context learning (ICL) by choosing more useful exemplars. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to capture task-agnostic similarities between input and output of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods integrate task-agnostic similarities of different levels between input and output of exemplars and test cases to eliminate costly data collection. |
Faithful and Robust LLM-Driven Theorem Proving for NLI Explanations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that the interaction of large language models (LLMs) with theorem provers (TPs) can help verify and improve the validity of NLI explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use logical expressions to guide LLMs in generating structured proof sketches and to use them to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategies improve autoformalisation, syntactic errors and explanation refinement over the state-of-the-art model. |
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability. |
Walk in Others’ Shoes with a Single Glance: Human-Centric Visual Grounding with Top-View Perspective Transformation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing VLMs are insensitive to information differences induced by slight perspective changes. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual perspective-taking task that requires robots to interpret human-centric instructions and identify corresponding objects from robot perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by up to 18% and generalizes effectively to robotic and dynamic scenarios. |
ValueBench: Towards Comprehensively Evaluating Value Orientations and Understanding of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations and novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline is grounded in realistic human-AI interactions and performs tasks that approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks. |
Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to construct CSKGs with large semantic coverage are expensive and introduce spurious noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a denoising framework that incorporates entity semantic information, global rules, and local structural information from the CSKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in noise detection tasks on synthetic noisy CSKG benchmarks. |
MAKI: Multi-layer Aligned Knowledge Injection for Structure-aware Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion methods struggle to capture structural information in knowledge graphs (KGs) Existing approaches for KGC focus on learning representations of entities and relations through observed structural patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer Aligned Knowledge Injection model that tightly integrates structured KG information into LLMs through multi-layered alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing ESC data entangles psychological strategies and response content, making it difficult to construct high-quality preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Decoupled ESC framework that decomposes the ESC task into two sequential subtasks: strategy planning and empathic response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines, reducing preference bias and improving response quality. |
Personalized Question Answering with User Profile Generation and Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are prone to providing “midguy” answers regardless of users’ knowledge background, thereby failing to meet each user’s personalized needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate personalized answers with LLMs based on users’ past question-answering records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates personalized answers based on user's past question-answering records. |
PretrainRL: Alleviating Factuality Hallucination of Large Language Models at the Beginning (2026.findings-acl)
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Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yejing Wang, Shilei Liu, Xin Tong, Yujin Yuan, Yongwei Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from factual hallucinations where they generate verifiable falsehoods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning into the pretraining phase to consolidate factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly alleviates factual hallucinations and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
Abstract-level Deductive Reasoning for Pre-trained Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune PLMs using the validity label and instance-level reasoning proofs as supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLMs to learn general reasoning patterns rather than instance-level knowledge by predicting the abstract reasoning proof of each sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces the impact of learning instance-level knowledge (over 70%) |
SCALE: Synergized Collaboration of Asymmetric Language Translation Engines (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects a compact Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that connects a Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both LLMs and supervised models in high-resource or challenging low-resourced settings. |
Jailbreaking Attacks vs. Content Safety Filters: How Far Are We in the LLM Safety Arms Race? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline . previous studies have underestimated the practical success of these attacks . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the effectiveness of jailbreak attacks targeting LLM safety alignment . they highlight critical gaps and call for further refinement of detection accuracy and usability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks can detect at least one safety filter across the entire deployment pipeline. |
Asking Questions Like Educational Experts: Automatically Generating Question-Answer Pairs on Real-World Examination Data (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate high quality question-answer pairs are limited . a new framework is proposed for the question-answer generation task on real-world examination data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent communication model to generate and optimize the question and keyphrases iteratively and then apply the generated question and keys to guide the generation of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes great breakthroughs in the question-answer pair generation task. |
Tree-CoT-RT: An Explainable Multi-Path Tree-Guided Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Zhenke Duan, Xin Yin, Haichuan Hu, Hualong Chen, null Suyi, Congqing He, Yike Tan, Yu-N Cheah
| Challenge: | Existing methods lack explainability and generalization, making it difficult to justify inference decisions and detect implicit sentiment across domains and varied expression patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable multi-path tree-guided chain-of-thought framework specifically designed for ASQP. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmark datasets show that Tree-CoT-RT outperforms baselines. |
Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Yi Cheng, Wenjun Hou, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning open-source LLMs are limited to text-based analysis under predefined general criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of proprietary models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluation methods in effectiveness and robustness. |
A Data-Centric Framework for Composable NLP Workflows (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengzhong Liu, Guanxiong Ding, Avinash Bukkittu, Mansi Gupta, Pengzhi Gao, Atif Ahmed, Shikun Zhang, Xin Gao, Swapnil Singhavi, Linwei Li, Wei Wei, Zecong Hu, Haoran Shi, Xiaodan Liang, Teruko Mitamura, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems involve interoperation among multiple components . a wealth of NLP toolkits exist ( 4), such as spaCy, DKPro, CoreNLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified open-source framework that supports fast development of NLP workflows . framework includes processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation . |
| Outcome: | The framework offers processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, and is extensible . it is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, Forte and Stave . |
What Are the Odds? Language Models Are Capable of Probabilistic Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Akshay Paruchuri, Jake Garrison, Shun Liao, John Hernandez, Jacob Sunshine, Tim Althoff, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff
| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks, but numerical reasoning is an area in which they struggle. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of language models using idealized and real-world statistical distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make inferences about distributions, even if assumptions are incorrect or misspecified. |
LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu, Jiankai Tang, Zhidian Huang, Zhengxiao Du, Xiao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding that extends context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms to improve models' long context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models but struggles on longer contexts. |
Sociolectal Analysis of Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using data from English cloze tests, we demonstrate wide performance gaps across demographic groups and show that pretrained language models disfavor young non-white male speakers. |
| Approach: | They use data from English cloze tests to examine performance differences of pretrained language models across demographic groups. |
| Outcome: | The models disfavor young non-white male speakers, but larger models reduce performance gaps between majority and minority groups. |
Visualize Before You Write: Imagination-Guided Open-Ended Text Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for text-to-image synthesis can visualize machine imaginations for a given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses machine-generated images to guide language models in open-ended text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective on open-ended text generation tasks while showing minor degeneration. |
Dynamic Collaboration of Multi-Language Models based on Minimal Complete Semantic Units (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning capabilities of language models are expensive and often lack the ability to perform complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level multi-model collaboration strategy to enhance reasoning capabilities in language models by selecting the optimal tokens from the next token distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods and will be released soon. |
CrystalICL: Enabling In-Context Learning for Crystal Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for crystal generation are limited to zero-shot scenarios and are unable to benefit from few-shot situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model designed for few-shot crystal generation that exploits in-context learning by capturing structure-property relationships from limited data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces complexity of modeling crystal symmetry in LLMs and exploits ICL by capturing structure-property relationships from limited data. |
A Thorough Examination on Zero-shot Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruiyang Ren, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu, Xin Zhao, Qifei Wu, Yuchen Ding, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in dense retrieval (DR) models have been shown to be not as competitive as traditional sparse retrieval models in a zero-shot retrieval setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the zero-shot capability of DR models by analyzing key factors related to source training set and potential bias from target dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is not as competitive as sparse retrieval models in a zero-shot retrieval setting. |
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information. |
TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation (D19-1)
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Ming Jiang, Qiuyuan Huang, Lei Zhang, Xin Wang, Pengchuan Zhang, Zhe Gan, Jana Diesner, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing metrics based on text-level comparisons fail to assess the quality of captions produced by machines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine-learned text-image grounding model to measure the accuracy of machine-generated captions and their correlation with human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher consistency with human judgments and is more accurate than existing metrics. |
MEFT: Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning through Sparse Adapter (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are limited on knowledge-intensive tasks due to the limited number of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that fine-tunes Large Language Models with larger adapters . they store and update the parameters of larger adapter adapters on the CPU . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to those obtained with larger memory capacities over the limited bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe). |
Towards Identifying Social Bias in Dialog Systems: Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jingyan Zhou, Jiawen Deng, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Yasheng Wang, Minlie Huang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Helen Meng
| Challenge: | a number of safety concerns hinder the deployment of open-domain dialog systems, such as offensive languages and toxic behaviors, such social bias is difficult to detect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dial-Bias Framework for analyzing social bias in conversations . they introduce a Chinese social bias dialog dataset and conduct in-depth ablation studies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first annotated Chinese social bias dialog dataset . the proposed framework also provides a fine-grained dialog bias measurement benchmark . |
Instantly Learning Preference Alignment via In-context DPO (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Presently, mainstream approaches to HPA heavily depend on fine-tuning . however, the huge computational and annotation costs of fine-timing are hard to ignore . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach to HPA using LLMs' decoding . they first rethink the derivation procedures of DPO and build an instant scorer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods even with tuning-free baselines and an upgraded scorer. |
LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies to build long context language models focus on context extension and continual training on long text. |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length . they adopt packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-uning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by 30% while maintaining proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. |
SAGE: Synergistic Adaptive Gating of Experts for Hateful Video Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hateful video detection rely on multimodal feature fusion . existing methods rely only on blind feature mixing, which leads to feature dilution . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from blind feature mixing to decision-level arbitration . it instantiates disentangled experts to rigorously preserve modality-specific semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on HateMM and MultiHateClip benchmarks. |
MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine learning (MU) have enabled the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to "reformulate" the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs by preserving only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines that finetuned MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. |
HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) are prone to generate hallucinations . a recent study shows that LLMs are able to generate content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) they propose to use a sample of generated and human-annotated hallucinated samples to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates and annotates hallucinated samples from ChatGPT . the results show that existing LLMs face great challenges in recognizing hallucines . |
Compilable Neural Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2022.findings-acl)
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Xin Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yao Wan, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Pingyi Zhou, Jin Liu, Hao Wu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing deep-learning approaches model code generation as text generation, but few of them account for compilability of the generated programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage pipeline utilizing compiler feedback for compilable code generation to improve compilability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves compilability of generated programs by combining compiler feedback, language model fine-tuning, and compilable discrimination. |
DebugBench: Evaluating Debugging Capability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yining Ye, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yinxu Pan, Yesai Wu, Hui Haotian, Liu Weichuan, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capabilities, but their debugging capabilities remain relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 LLMs with four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems (2021.naacl-industry)
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Tong Wang, Jiangning Chen, Mohsen Malmir, Shuyan Dong, Xin He, Han Wang, Chengwei Su, Yue Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding component makes the interpretation decision before the mentioned entities are resolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking to learn model weights . they propose a score distribution matching method to ensure the models are calibrated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model on multiple domain evaluations. |
Reefknot: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Relation Hallucination Evaluation, Analysis and Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on object-level or attribute-level hallucinations, neglecting the more complex relation hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark targeting relation hallucinations comprising over 20,000 real-world samples and a confidence-based mitigation strategy which reduces the halluciation rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets, including Reefknot. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
Socratic Style Chain-of-Thoughts Help LLMs to be a Better Reasoner (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Synthetic data generation is a promising approach to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework based on the Socratic questioning strategy . they use socratic questions to deepen the thinking process and broaden it to motivate self-reflection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on math and code generation tasks while maintaining affordable costs. |
PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on ten datasets across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach which uses span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on ten datasets across seven domains. |
Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a trajectory-level preference benchmark to evaluate judges' ability to distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in tool-integrated environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios. |
A General Framework for Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to Simultaneous Translation (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of neural machine translation, simultaneous neural machine translators are challenging due to syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously . they propose 'prefix translation' that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework balancing quality and latency on three translation corpora and two language pairs shows that it performs well. |
An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds. |
Unsupervised Multimodal Clustering for Semantics Discovery in Multimodal Utterances (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for semantics discovery focus on text, video, and audio, failing to leverage the rich multimodal information in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct augmentation views for multimodal data and use them to perform pre-training to establish well-initialized representations for subsequent clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on benchmark multimodal intent and dialogue act datasets by 2-6% over state-of-the-art methods. |
WenetSpeech-Wu: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Models for a Unified Chinese Wu Dialect Speech Processing Ecosystem (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyou Wang, Mingchen Shao, Jingbin Hu, Zeyu Zhu, Hongfei Xue, Bingshen Mu, Xin Xu, Xingyi Duan, Binbin Zhang, Zhu Pengcheng, Chuang Ding, Xiaojun Zhang, Hui Bu, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | despite its linguistic significance, the Wu dialect of Chinese has long been hindered by the lack of large-scale speech data, standardized evaluation benchmarks, and publicly available models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use WenetSpeech-Wu as a large-scale, multi-dimensionally annotated open-source speech corpus for the Wu dialect of Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 8,000 hours of speech data and strong open-source models . the proposed dataset is competitive and empirically validated . |
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. |
Towards Building More Robust NER datasets: An Empirical Study on NER Dataset Bias from a Dataset Difficulty View (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models rely on superficial entity patterns for predictions, without considering evidence from the context. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-bias NER datasets by altering entity-context distribution . they also validate the feasibility of the proposed de-bianking techniques . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be applied to different models and improve existing models. |
RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on question scenarios with clear user intents and concise answers, but it is prevalent that users issue broad, open-ended queries with diverse sub-intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that includes a sub-aspect explorer and a multi-faceted retriever to build a candidate pool of diverse external documents related to these sub-intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides comprehensive and satisfying responses to users on two publicly available datasets. |
Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They evaluate cross-lingual context retrieval of over 40 large language models . they use cross-linguistic machine reading comprehension as a representative scenario . |
| Outcome: | The results show that open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability . the results also show that their oracle performances improve after training . |
Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory (2023.findings-acl)
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Daliang Li, Ankit Singh Rawat, Manzil Zaheer, Xin Wang, Michal Lukasik, Andreas Veit, Felix Yu, Sanjiv Kumar
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing due to the massive amounts of world knowledge they memorize during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject counterfactual and irrelevant contexts into standard supervised datasets to strengthen both controllability and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves controllability and robustness across model architectures and sizes. |
Unlocking the Effectiveness of LoRA-FP for Seamless Transfer Implantation of Fingerprints in Downstream Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | lightweight plug-and-play framework that encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters . |
| Approach: | proposed framework encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters via constrained fine-tuning . enables seamless fingerprint transplantation through parameter fusion, eliminating full-parameter updates while maintaining integrity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior robustness against various scenarios while reducing computational overhead compared to traditional approaches. |
Interpretable Rationale Augmented Charge Prediction System (C18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat charge prediction as a text classification problem, but in the field of justice, every decision may be a matter of life and death. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract readable rationales from text and then create a rationale augmented classification model to enhance the prediction accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract readable rationales in a high consistency with manual annotation and is comparable with the attention model in prediction accuracy. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
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Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| 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. |
Unlocking General Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Representation Engineering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work finds that long CoT reasoning can be efficiently elicited by tuning on only a few examples and can easily transfer to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation engineering method to unleash the general long CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. |
MetaLadder: Ascending Mathematical Solution Quality via Analogical-Problem Reasoning Transfer (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current paradigms generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard CoT-based methods on mathematical benchmarks and significantly improves their reasoning accuracy. |
Chain-of-Rewrite: Aligning Question and Documents for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer open-domain question have encountered term mismatch and limited interaction between IR systems and large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages the guidance and feedback gained from the analysis to provide faithful and consistent extensions for effective question answering. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four open-domain question answering datasets show the proposed method performs well under zero-shot settings. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
BASES: Large-scale Web Search User Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on web search rely on real-user experiments, which can be costly to scale up. |
| Approach: | They propose a user simulation framework with LLM-based agents that can generate unique user profiles at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate unique user profiles at scale, leading to diverse search behaviors. |
CAME: Confidence-guided Adaptive Memory Efficient Optimization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory-efficient methods require second-moment estimates of the per-parameter gradients to maintain their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use memory-efficient optimizers to reduce memory usage by preserving second-moment estimates of gradients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fast convergence and lower memory usage across training tasks. |
HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current RAG system retrieves evidence from knowledge graphs and text documents but has limitations in multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, and source verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that unifies graph topology, document semantics, and source reliability to support deep, faithful reasoning in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the current hybrid model-based model-driven system by 20.3% and 30.1% on seven benchmark datasets. |
Chaining the Evidence: Robust Reinforcement Learning for Deep Search Agents with Citation-Aware Rubric Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL) rely on binary outcome rewards that fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of agents’ reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward framework that emphasizes reasoning comprehensiveness, factual grounding, and evidence connectivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard outcome-based RL baselines across multiple deep search benchmarks and shows that it discourages shortcut exploitation and promotes comprehensive, evidence-grounded reasoning. |
Context-Value-Action Architecture for Value-Driven Large Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw often masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Context-Value-Action architecture that decouples action generation from cognitive reasoning via a Value Verifier trained on authentic human data to explicitly model dynamic value activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture significantly outperforms baseline models on 1.1 million real-world interaction traces on CVABench. |
Rewriting the Code: A Simple Method for Large Language Model Augmented Code Search (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that ReCo significantly boosts retrieval accuracy across sparse, zero-shot dense and fine-tuned dense search settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a generation-augmented retrieval framework that additionally Rewrites the Code (ReCo) within the codebase for style normalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly boosts retrieval accuracy across sparse, zero-shot dense, and fine-tuned dense retrieval settings in diverse search scenarios. |
Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References (2024.naacl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Hongyuan Lu, Yuchen Jiang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tom Kocmi, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks with limited references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model’s hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enrich evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of a single reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
No Metrics Are Perfect: Adversarial Reward Learning for Visual Storytelling (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Visual captioning is aimed at depicting the concrete content of images, but its capability of performing human-like understanding is still restrictive. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adversarial REward Learning framework to learn an implicit reward function from human demonstrations and optimize policy search with the learned reward function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in cloning expert behaviors, but human evaluation shows that it achieves significant improvement in generating more human-like stories than SOTA systems. |
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new problem of grounding natural language instructions to mobile UI actions is emerging . we use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instruction . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PixelHelp. |
SolEval: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Repository-level Solidity Smart Contract Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on Python and Java, neglecting Solidity, the programming language for Ethereum smart contracts. |
| Approach: | They construct a repository-level benchmark for Solidity to evaluate the performance of LLMs on Ethereum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the best performing LLM achieves only 26.29% Pass@10, highlighting room for improvement in Solidity code generation. |
LogicPoison: Logical Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, traditional RAG attacks are difficult to pose an effective threat to GraphRAg systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents into GraphRAG systems by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on GraphRAG systems in both effectiveness and stealth. |
CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot commonsense question answering use incomplete CSKBs . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of the CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAR can generalize to zero-shot commonsense scenarios . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, Qinyu Chen, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Kezhao Huang, Xingkai Yu, Zhewen Hao, Han Zhang, Yu-Kun Li, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but lacks knowledge lookup primitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional memory instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE) they propose 'u-shaped scaling law' that identifies optimal balance between MoE experts and DSE memory . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms an iso-parameter and isoFLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks and is infrastructure-efficient. |
MNER-MI: A Multi-image Dataset for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition in Social Media (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) but current approaches focus on text and a single accompanying image, leaving a significant research gap in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a human-annotated MNER dataset with multiple images called MNER-MI and a temporal prompt model with multiple image to address the new challenges in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both MNER-MI and MNER -MI-Plus, demonstrating its effectiveness. |
RADAR: Risk-Aware Distilled Adaptive Routing for Efficient Short-Form Video Platform Ecosystem Governance (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to address inefficiency in large-scale integrity enforcement on short-form video platforms require multiple specialized vertical modules . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight risk-aware routing framework that selectively releases low-risk content while dispatching high-risk instances to appropriate vertical modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework selectively releases low-risk content while dispatching high-risk instances to appropriate vertical modules. |
Scaling up Open Tagging from Tens to Thousands: Comprehension Empowered Attribute Value Extraction from Product Title (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models treat each attribute as an entity type and build one set of NER tags for each of them, leading to scalability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose to regard attribute as a query and adopt only one global set of BIO tags for any attributes to reduce the burden of attribute tag or model explosion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and generates promising results for 8,906 attributes. |
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLM-based moderation methods have demonstrated remarkable promise in identifying safety risks associated with both inputs and outputs in human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a classification head on the last-layer hidden states of a dialogue model and use it to detect harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is 300 faster (**1ms**) than previous LLM-based moderation models with 99% less parameters than LlamaGuard. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated ChatGPT's remarkable few-shot, even zero-shot learning abilities when compared to other models. |
| Approach: | They quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a research topic that is gaining attention in the field of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to build an embodied agent that can communicate with humans in natural language and navigate in real 3D environments. |
| Outcome: | This paper reviews current studies in the emerging field of vision-and-language navigation . it highlights limitations and opportunities for future work . |
Transformation Networks for Target-Oriented Sentiment Classification (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new model for sentiment classification uses attention instead of attention to classify sentiment polarities over individual opinion targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a CNN layer to extract salient features from transformed word representations from a bi-directional RNN layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a few benchmarks. |
Label-Specific Document Representation for Multi-Label Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify documents using labels only assign one label to document . multi-label text classification is a challenging task because of the huge amount of documents, words and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a Label-Specific Attention Network (LSAN) to learn a label-specific document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets . it can predict low-frequency labels, and it can be used in sentimental analysis . |
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/. |
Neuro-Symbolic Integration Brings Causal and Reliable Reasoning Proofs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for complex reasoning with LLMs is developed to improve reasoning proof accuracy and interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate search logs that can be interpreted into human-readable reasoning proofs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning accuracy but lacks interpretability due to black-box nature of the solvers. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Improving Unsupervised Question Answering via Summarization-Informed Question Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Generation (QG) is the production of meaningful questions given a set of input passages and corresponding answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses questions generated heuristically from news summaries as a source of training data for a QG system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous unsupervised models on three in-domain datasets and three out-of-domain ones. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements. |
Soul-Mix: Enhancing Multimodal Machine Translation with Manifold Mixup (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve the performance of machine translation with the help of visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal machine translation mixup method that integrates visual information into conventional text-only neural machine translation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on a multi-directional dataset with fewer parameters and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. |
ReasoningLM: Enabling Structural Subgraph Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) aims to find answer entities for natural language questions based on knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph-aware self-attention mechanism to imitate the graph neural network (GNN) based module to perform multi-hop reasoning on KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin even with fewer updated parameters and less training data. |
Planning, Creation, Usage: Benchmarking LLMs for Comprehensive Tool Utilization in Real-World Complex Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)
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Shijue Huang, Wanjun Zhong, Jianqiao Lu, Qi Zhu, Jiahui Gao, Weiwen Liu, Yutai Hou, Xingshan Zeng, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ruifeng Xu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on simple synthesized queries that do not reflect real-world complexity, thereby offering limited perspectives in evaluating tool utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs’ ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios and eliminates the restriction of pre-defined toolset. |
Put It Back: Entity Typing with Language Model Enhancement (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing Entity typing models suffer from noisy labels due to distant supervision . |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance existing entity typing models with language model enhancement to measure compatibility between context sentences and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Code Large Language Models can address a wide range of code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate widespread and versatile instruction data from open source code datasets and use it to train code-related models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in generalization ability across code-related tasks. |
Beyond Itinerary Planning—A Real-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn and Tool-Using Travel Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM performance on travel planning have shown that existing settings are limited due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' planning and tool-use abilities in real-world settings by collecting user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates agents' capabilities in real-world settings and shows that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
Hierarchical Safety Realignment: Lightweight Restoration of Safety in Pruned Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that pruning can reduce model performance, but it can also lead to degradation in safety performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical safety realignment approach to prune large vision-Language Models . they quantify contribution of each attention head to safety and restore neurons . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant safety improvements in LVLMs pruned post pruning. |
BNLP: A Text Annotation Platform for Quality Control of LLM-Generated Annotations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotation tools lack support for Large Language Models (LLMs) or use LLMs as one-off preannotation engines, compromising data reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a text annotation platform that embeds LLM-assisted labeling into a quality-aware collaborative workflow. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that BNLP reduces annotation time by 74.3% and improves annotation quality by 11.6% over purely manual annotation in LLM-assisted settings. |
Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that KV cache compression can increase hallucination scores in LLMs . modern LLM models support extremely long sequences, but their impact on model hallucinosity remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination across multiple models and datasets while preserving computational efficiency. |
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments. |
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. |
SAFE-QAQ: End-to-End Slow-Thinking Audio-Text Fraud Detection via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Peidong Wang, Zhiming Ma, Xin Dai, YongKang Liu, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Wenxing Hu, Zhihao Wang, Mingjun Pan, Li Yuan, Daling Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fraud detection rely on transcribed text, lacking acoustic cues . a proposed framework for audio-based slow-thinking fraud detection eliminates transcription errors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for audio-based slow-thinking fraud detection that eliminates transcription errors and rewards slow-thought reasoning by capturing fine-grained audio details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy, inference efficiency, and real-time processing capabilities. |
Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in few-shot learning tasks . however, when applied to token-level labeling tasks, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all potential entity spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reformulate NER tasks as LM problems without templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 30.12 times faster than the template-based method under few-shot settings. |
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Zhaowei Liu, Hanyang Cao, Zhi Yang, Zhiqiang Liu, Sizhe Wang, Jinyi Niu, Chuqi Wang, Yanhui Wang, Xiaolong Liang, Xiaoming Huang, Bing Zhu, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Chen, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| 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. |
JobFair: A Framework for Benchmarking Gender Hiring Bias in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Ze Wang, Zekun Wu, Xin Guan, Michael Thaler, Adriano Koshiyama, Skylar Lu, Sachin Beepath, Ediz Ertekin, Maria Perez-Ortiz
| Challenge: | a framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) is developed to protect vulnerable demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models for resume scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals significant issues of reverse gender hiring bias and overdebiasing in ten state-of-the-art LLMs. |
Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modeling (2026.eacl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Zhaobo Wang, Junfei Cheng, Dan Yu, Zerui Huang, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Chen Luo, Yanming Zhu, Bo Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs focus on connecting intentions but lacks the ability to model the relationships between different intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically generate an intention knowledge graph, capturing connections between user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and shows its utility. |
SVD-LLM V2: Optimizing Singular Value Truncation for Large Language Model Compression (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing Large Language Models suffer from significant truncation losses. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method that optimizes singular value truncation in SVD compression . they use dynamic compression ratio allocation to balance the large tuncation loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on ten datasets and five models on various scales. |
On Construction of the ASR-oriented Indian English Pronunciation Dictionary (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Indian English (IE) has distinctive characteristics, especially phonologically, from other varieties of English. |
| Approach: | They build a small IE spontaneous speech corpus and use a linguistically-guided IE pronunciation dictionary to apply it to IE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better on IE spontaneous speech data than the one trained with CMUdict. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation (2023.findings-acl)
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Siheng Li, Yichun Yin, Cheng Yang, Wangjie Jiang, Yiwei Li, Zesen Cheng, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a dialogue system can lead the conversation based on key topics of the news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can lead conversations based on key topics of the news . it can also be used in information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios . |
Watermarking with Low-Entropy POS-Guided Token Partitioning and Z-Score-Driven Dynamic Bias for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking methods reduce the fidelity of semantics in LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-entropy token partitioning mechanism and z-score-driven dynamic bias mechanism to enhance semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves semantic fidelity and robustness against bias sparsity attacks. |
CoCGAN: Contrastive Learning for Adversarial Category Text Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on synthetic and real category text generation datasets demonstrate that CoCGAN can achieve significant improvements over the baseline category text generators. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate contrastive learning into adversarial category text generation by using a discriminator to optimize a contrastive learn objective to capture more flexible data-to-class relations and data- to-data relations among training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on synthetic and real category text generation datasets. |
Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a task of assigning entity mentions to referent entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ultra-fine-grained type information to improve the generalization ability of EL models by utilizing a low-level task to extract ultra-finish entity type information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the zero-shot entity linking task . |
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
AI2Agent: An End-to-End Framework for Deploying AI Projects as Autonomous Agents (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiaxiang Chen, Jingwei Shi, Lei Gan, Jiale Zhang, Qingyu Zhang, Dongqian Zhang, Pang Xin, Zhucong Li, Xu Yinghui
| Challenge: | a new framework automates deployment and debugging of AI projects . complexity of environment configurations, dependency conflicts, and debuggering issues hinder scalability and adoption. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that automates AI project deployment . they conducted experiments on 30 AI deployment cases to evaluate its effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces deployment time and improves success rates by reducing human intervention. |
DiscoPrompt: Path Prediction Prompt Tuning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on implicit discourse relation recognition focus on syntax features and lack of connectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based path prediction method that integrates the interactive information and intrinsic senses among the hierarchy in IDRR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant improvement against competitive baselines. |
Pyramid-BERT: Reducing Complexity via Successive Core-set based Token Selection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use heuristics to shorten sequence lengths are computationally prohibitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to shorten sequence lengths by transforming tokens through encoders and a core-set based token selection method that avoids expensive pre-training and fine tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on GLUE benchmarks and Long Range Arena datasets and demonstrates that it is cost-effective and space-efficient. |
Leveraging Capsule Routing to Associate Knowledge with Medical Literature Hierarchically (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate knowledge into text can confuse the representation and import unexpected noises. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage capsule routing to associate knowledge with medical literature hierarchically . they extract two fragments from medical literature and encode them into fragment representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can more accurately associate knowledge with medical literature than mainstream methods. |
Leveraging High-Resource English Corpora for Cross-lingual Domain Adaptation in Low-Resource Japanese Medicine via Continued Pre-training (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kazuma Kobayashi, Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Yuma Tsuta, Xin Zhao, Junfeng Jiang, Jiahao Huang, Zhiyi Huang, Yusuke Oda, Rio Yokota, Yuki Arase, Daisuke Kawahara, Akiko Aizawa, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | low-resource language corpora in professional domains like medicine hinder cross-lingual domain adaptation of pre-trained large language models. |
| Approach: | They examine how linguistic features affect performance on a Japanese–English medical knowledge benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leverage English-language resources in medical domains while ensuring sufficient coverage of language-specific expressions in a target language. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| 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. |
Pre-training CLIP against Data Poisoning with Optimal Transport-based Matching and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. |
| Approach: | They propose an Optimal Transport-based framework to reconstruct image-caption pairs and propose an optimal transport-based distance measure to re-assign new captions based on the proposed optimal transport distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the attack success rates of poisoning attacks to 0% in most cases. |
Instruction-Tuning Data Synthesis from Scratch via Web Reconstruction (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Xinyi Dai, Yan Xu, Weinan Gan, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating and curating high-quality instruction-tuning data rely heavily on the quality of seed data or strong assumptions about the structure and content of web documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for synthesizing high-quality instruction-tuning (IT) data directly from raw web documents with minimal assumptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.65% across four instruction-following benchmarks. |
Enhancing Multilingual Language Model with Massive Multilingual Knowledge Triples (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for language model pretraining use limited knowledge graph data for knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to make better use of multilingual annotations and language agnostic properties of KG triples for pretraining LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show significant performance improvements on a wide range of knowledge-intensive cross-lingual tasks. |
Easy Guided Decoding in Providing Suggestions for Interactive Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In order to improve translation efficiency, human translators perform post-editing on machine translations to correct errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the parameterized objective function of neural machine translation to deal with the TS problem without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality by 10.6 BLEU and reduces time overhead by 63.4% on benchmark datasets. |
Self-Foveate: Enhancing Diversity and Difficulty of Synthesized Instructions from Unsupervised Text via Multi-Level Foveation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models rely on human effort for data annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that generates unsupervised instruction from unsupervised text using a "Micro-Scatter-Macro" method that excavates fine-grained information embedded in unsupervised texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves diversity and difficulty of synthesized instructions across multiple unsupervised corpora and diverse model architectures. |
“What’s Up, Doc?”: Analyzing How Users Seek Health Information in Large-Scale Conversational AI Datasets (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Akshay Paruchuri, Maryam Aziz, Rohit Vartak, Ayman Ali, Best Uchehara, Xin Liu, Ishan Chatterjee, Monica Agrawal
| Challenge: | a growing number of people are seeking healthcare information from large language models via chatbots, yet the nature and inherent risks of these interactions remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They use a curated dataset of 11K real-world conversations composed of 25K user messages to analyze user interactions across 21 health specialties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 11K real-world conversations composed of 25K user messages. |
Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods do not provide fine-grained supervision for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning method that incorporates a generative model as the reward model and a token-level supervision model for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 8 tasks show the proposed method is effective . |
Whether LLMs Know If They Know: Identifying Knowledge Boundaries via Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active retrieval (AR) rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify knowledge boundaries in active retrieval by retrieving historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training. |
Not Everything is All You Need: Toward Low-Redundant Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that large language models are struggling to align with human preference in complex tasks and scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-redundant alignment method that selects the top-10% most updated parameters in LLMs for alignment training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 10 datasets and shows that it is redundant . it can be used to train LLMs on QA and ECQA datasets, but it is not feasible to test it on a large dataset. |
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)
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Hexiang Tan, Wanli Yang, Junwei Zhang, Xin Chen, Rui Tang, Du Su, Jingang Wang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Fei Sun, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines. |
SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for multilingual foundation models is being developed . brittleness of foundation models in the dimensions of semantics and multilinguality is a key limitation . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multilingual foundation models, SeaEval . they examine how well these models comprehend cultural practices, nuances, and values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate multilingual and multicultural scenarios. |
Rethinking Negative Pairs in Code Search (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Comparative learning is a key component in fine-tuning code search models . however, negative samples of InfoNCE may deteriorate its representation learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a loss function that inserts weight terms into InfoNCE to improve contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed loss function is a special case of Soft-InfoNCE, the authors show . it is more accurate than other loss functions, and it is faster than other models. |
Divide-Then-Align: Honest Alignment based on the Knowledge Boundary of RAG (2025.acl-long)
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Xin Sun, Jianan Xie, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Yuehe Chen, Bowen Song, Zilei Wang, Weiqiang Wang, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have significantly advanced natural language processing tasks by integrating external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conditions large language models to generate answers even in the absence of reliable knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach balances accuracy with appropriate abstention, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems. |
PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Dadi Guo, Donghao Li, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Xin Liu, Chunkit Chan, Duanyi Yao, Yuan Yao, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | generative large language models (LLMs) exhibit surprising capability and integrate previous tasks into a unified text generation formulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy evaluation benchmark to quantify the privacy leakage of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares PPLMs with different privacy implementations to find out how privacy leakage is handled. |
Think More, Hallucinate Less: Mitigating Hallucinations via Dual Process of Fast and Slow Thinking (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the issue of hallucination in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows an explicit slow thinking generation process for mitigating hallucinations during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches on English and Chinese datasets. |
IBADR: an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement Framework for Debiasing NLU models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using manual data analysis, dataset refinement approaches are often unable to cover all the potential biased features. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative bias-aware dataset refinement framework which debiases NLU models without predefining biased features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and is compatible with model-centric methods. |
Coupling Context Modeling with Zero Pronoun Recovering for Document-Level Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | ZP-annotated natural language generation (NLG) corpora are scarce in pro-drop languages . despite efforts to bridge the discrepancy between human and machine, zero pronouns still persist in pro -drop tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a highly adaptive two-stage approach to couple context modeling with ZP recovering to mitigate the ZP problem in NLG tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can improve translation, question answering, and summarization tasks. |
Multimodal Text Style Transfer for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation (2021.eacl-main)
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Wanrong Zhu, Xin Wang, Tsu-Jui Fu, An Yan, Pradyumna Narayana, Kazoo Sone, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Outdoor vision-and-language navigation (VLN) tasks require visual grounding to generate correct actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal text style transfer learning approach to mitigate data scarcity in outdoor vision-and-language navigation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on the outdoor vision-and-language navigation task, improving task completion rate by 8.7% relative to the baseline models. |
LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenjin Liu, Haoran Luo, Xin Feng, Xiang Ji, Lijuan Zhou, Rui Mao, Jiapu Wang, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal general intelligence (GI) are result-oriented and do not evaluate the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal benchmark for evaluating legal GI in large language models . they use recent legal cases and exam questions to create multiple-choice questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack a systematic evaluation of the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs) the results show that even the best LLMs lagging behind human legal professionals. |
Finding Educationally Supportive Contexts for Vocabulary Learning with Attention-Based Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying educationally supportive contexts for vocabulary learning is an important problem to solve for designing effective curricula for contextual word learning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate attention-based approaches to find supportive contexts for vocabulary learning scenarios using an existing benchmark dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a generic model and a custom model on a major dataset for educational context support prediction. |
Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on predicting the four elements in one shot, instead of predicting them all. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to jointly detect all sentiment elements in quads for a given opinionated sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate the semantics of the sentiment elements in the natural language form. |
MGCL: Multi-Granularity Clue Learning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction via Cross-Grained Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods often rely on coarse-grained clause-level annotations, which overlook valuable fine-grain clues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures fine-grained clues from a weakly-supervised perspective efficiently by using a teacher model to give sub-clause clues without needing fine-grain annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering improved interpretability. |
Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | In many approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks, language is inherently interactive. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-AI collaboration to improve human-human interaction by providing feedback that the agent can understand and utilize. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is an interactive grounded language understanding task in a MineCraft-like world. |
CRST: a Claim Retrieval System in Twitter (C18-2)
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| Challenge: | CRST retrieves tweets containing arguments for controversial topics from Twitter. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that retrieves tweets containing claims for a given topic from Twitter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing claims retrieval and argument mining systems. |
A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment between Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for EA between temporal KGs incorporate relational and temporal information into entity embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate unsupervised alignment seeds using temporal information from TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous methods by using temporal information. |
Language-specific Effects on Automatic Speech Recognition Errors for World Englishes (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems are not able to meet the needs of speakers of different demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze the performance of Otter’s automatic captioning system on native and non-native English speakers of different language background through a linguistic analysis of segment-level errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system predicts certain errors from the phonological structure of a speaker’s native language. |
ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models rarely consider incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs) Existing models capture rich semantic patterns from plain text and can be fine-tuned to improve performance of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate knowledge graphs into pre-trained language models to enhance language representation with external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can take full advantage of lexical, syntactic, and knowledge information simultaneously. |
A Predicate-Function-Argument Annotation of Natural Language for Open-Domain Information eXpression (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing OIE (Open Information Extraction) algorithms are redundant and not reusable. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline where an Open-domain Information eXpression task provides a platform for all OIE strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline provides a platform for all OIE strategies. |
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. |
Process-based Self-Rewarding Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reward LLMs' outputs are not effective in mathematical reasoning scenarios and may lead to a decline in performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-based self-rewarding pipeline that integrates long-thought reasoning, step-wise LLM-as-a-Judge, and step- wise preference optimization within the existing paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of Large Language Models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and shows that it can surpass human capabilities. |
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)
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Zefan Cai, Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Jiaqi Han, Gang Yuan, Binghuai Lin, Baobao Chang, Yunbo Cao
| 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. |
Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Xuanang Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In this study, we uncover interpretable latents that govern RAG behavior in large language models . Sparse Autoencoders are used to control large language model (LLM) behavior . |
| Approach: | They leverage Sparse Autoencoders within the LLaMA Scope to uncover latents that govern RAG behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to control large language models without architectural modifications. |
CDAˆ2: Counterfactual Diffusion Augmentation for Cross-Domain Adaptation in Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Domain adaptation is widely employed in cross-domain sentiment analysis, but concerns have been raised regarding their robustness and sensitivity to data distribution shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework CDA2 for cross-domain adaptation in low-resource sentiment analysis which employs counterfactual diffusion augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality counterfactual target samples and achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |
The BQ Corpus: A Large-scale Domain-specific Chinese Corpus For Sentence Semantic Equivalence Identification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Bank Question corpus is a corpus for sentence semantic equivalence identification (SSEI) because of rich expressions in natural languages, SSEI is really a challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose to cluster 120,000 question pairs from 1-year online bank custom service logs into stacks by the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) based Affinity Propagation algorithm to achieve questions with the same intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves questions with the same intent by clustering deduplicated questions into stacks by the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) based Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm. |
Voice Query Auto Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods fail to complete voice queries from incomplete prefixes because they use orthographic prefix and substrings instead of the true phonetic prefix. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method obtains an 18% relative improvement over previous methods on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic. |
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yue Wang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao, Xin He, Qu Yang, Qingxuan Jiang, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization. |
Towards Generating Long and Coherent Text with Multi-Level Latent Variable Models (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have received much attention as an end-to-end architecture for text generation with latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage several multi-level structures to learn a variational autoencoder model for generating long, and coherent text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces more coherent and less repetitive long text compared to baselines and mitigates posterior collapse issue. |
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucination detection rely heavily on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework called HaluAgent that integrates LLMs, multi-functional toolbox and a memory mechanism for hallucination detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and can detect hallucinations on Chinese and English datasets. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| 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. |
Query Enhanced Knowledge-Intensive Conversation via Unsupervised Joint Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve knowledge-intensive conversations are based on external resources such as Wikipedia databases or search engine results. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations . they conduct experiments on three knowledge- intensive conversation datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better than all unsupervised methods across three datasets and achieves competitive performance compared to supervised methods. |
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking leads to better results . a recent study suggests that test-time compute scaling is more effective than model scaling . |
| Approach: | They challenge the assumption that longer thinking yields better results . they show that models exhibit overthinking and marginal returns diminish at higher budgets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computation significantly while maintaining comparable accuracy. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) methods are not capable of extracting relation labels for individual sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning relation extraction framework for sentence-level DSRE . they discard only the labels of the noisy samples and utilize them as unlabeled samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance enhancements on two real-world datasets. |
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Yu Zi Wei, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks. |
Speak No Evil, Just Prompt: Low-resource Multilingual Toxic Speech Detection with Audio Language Model (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for toxic speech detection rely on high-resource languages and lack acoustic cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based adaptation framework that performs end-to-end toxicity detection without ASR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a micro-averaged ROC-AUC of 98.07% on polySpeechTox . it is based on a frozen audio language model and can perform end-to-end toxicity detection without ASR . |
A Variational Approach to Weakly Supervised Document-Level Multi-Aspect Sentiment Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing weakly supervised methods for document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification are not easy to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification using target-opinion word pairs as "supervision" they aim to learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods with hundreds of labels per aspect. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |
Optimize Weight Rounding via Signed Gradient Descent for the Quantization of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in language-related tasks, but their deployment poses significant memory and storage requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes rounding values and weight clipping within 200 steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves exceptional results across 2 to 4 bits while maintaining low tuning costs and avoiding additional inference overhead. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wai-Chung Kwan, Xingshan Zeng, Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on single-turn evaluations, overlooking the models’ capabilities in multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the multi-turn conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs) by analyzing human-LLM conversations and constructing multi-turned queries for each category using GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in multi-turn tasks while retaining and recalling historical information. |
Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical study shows superiority of proposed method over time-tested knowledge-driven and data-driven methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive knowledge graph that unifies expert rules and relational facts as the substrate of machine learning and reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show the proposed method superior to time-tested methods . the proposed model can perform both learning and reasoning with labeled data . |
AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically searches architecture hyper-parameters in BERT . they use one-shot learning and the search space to provide an adaptive development way . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms both the baseline and distillation-based methods on GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks. |
An Empirical Analysis on Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown impressive generalization ability on vision and language tasks, but their spatial understanding is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They construct a VQA dataset to analyze LMMs' spatial reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| 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. |
Small and Practical BERT Models for Sequence Labeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for morphosyntactic tagging have focused on building separate models for each language or for a small group of related languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a scheme to train a single multilingual sequence labeling model that is small and fast enough to run on a CPU. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on low-resource languages and low-level models on codemixed inputs. |
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks. |
Understanding the Information Propagation Effects of Communication Topologies in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies for communication topology design often overlook why and when sparse and dense topologies help or hinder collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology design approach that balances error suppression and beneficial information propagation by fusing connectivity patterns from dense and sparse graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology design achieves superior performance across tasks with sparse and dense graphs. |
Certified Error Control of Candidate Set Pruning for Two-Stage Relevance Ranking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In information retrieval, candidate set pruning is used to speed up two-stage relevance ranking but lacks accurate error control and empirical guarantees. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that guarantees the test error after pruning is controlled under a user-specified threshold with high probability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the average set size from 1000 to 27, increasing reranking speed by about 37 times while keeping MRR@10 greater than a pre-specified value of 0.38 with about 90% empirical coverage. |
SDD: Self-Degraded Defense against Malicious Fine-tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) employ safety alignment methods to resist harmful instructions, but malicious fine-tuning can easily bypass these safeguards. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to prevent malicious fine-tuning of large language models on harmful data by using alignment methods that encourage them to produce irrelevant responses to harmful prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the general capability of the LLM when malicious fine-tuning fails, rendering it incapable of following harmful instructions. |
SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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Junkai Chen, Huihui Huang, Yunbo Lyu, Junwen An, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Haoye Tian, Yikun Li, Zhenhao Li, Xin Zhou, Xing Hu, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to capture scenarios in which vulnerabilities are introduced by humans . we evaluate 5 popular code agents supported by 5 LLMs on SecureVibeBench . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that compares 105 C/C++ secure coding tasks . they use real-world open-source vulnerabilities and a comprehensive evaluation tool . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that code agents struggle to produce correct and secure code . the best performing agent produces merely 23.8% correct and secured solutions . |
Towards Text-Image Interleaved Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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Xin Zhang, Ziqi Dai, Yongqi Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Meishan Zhang, Jun Yu, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal information retrieval models rely on single-image inputs . current models use a dense retrieval paradigm, but this approach is not effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a text-image interleaved retrieval task where query and document are interleaves . they adapt off-the-shelf retrievers and build a dense baseline by interleaded multimodal large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant improvements over the baseline by substantially fewer visual tokens. |
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
ContextCheck: Sentence-Level Faithfulness Verification with Context-Aware Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yueqin Yin, Yaxi Li, Xin Liu, Xun Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Simin Ma, Shujian Liu, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Pengcheng He, Mingyuan Zhou, Song Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models often hallucinate, producing content that is factually incorrect or not grounded in the sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for sentence-level faithfulness verification with context-aware disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Macro F1 by over 10 points compared to baselines on three context-dependent datasets. |
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. |
PEIRCE: Unifying Material and Formal Reasoning via LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Refinement (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of material inference but lack formal rigour and verifiability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to unify material and formal inference through an iterative conjecture–criticism process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies material and formal inference through an iterative conjecture–criticism process. |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuchong Sun, Che Liu, Kun Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Ruihua Song, Xin Zhao, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. |
R2H: Building Multimodal Navigation Helpers that Respond to Help Requests (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog-based embodied datasets are not sufficient to develop intelligent navigation-helper agents capable of navigating users in unfamiliar areas. |
| Approach: | They introduce a novel benchmark, Respond to Help Requests, to promote the development of multi-modal navigation helpers capable of responding to requests for help . they also propose two approaches to construct the navigation-helper agent, including fine-tuning a task-oriented multi-mod response generation model that can see and respond, named SeeRee, and employing . a multi-module large language model in a zero-shot manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model and the proposed model on two tasks based on human evaluations and automatic benchmarking. |
Transform Retrieval for Textual Entailment in RAG (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods prioritize relevance without ensuring the retrieved documents semantically support answering the queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to improve Textual Entailment Retrieval within the framework of Retri-Augmented Generation (RAG) they transform query embeddings to better align with semantic entailment without re-encoding the document corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach consistently approaches the skyline across multiple datasets, demonstrating its strength in many-to-many retrieval scenarios. |
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT is a non-parametric method that uses nearest neighbor retrieval to translate out-of-domain sentences, rare words, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences to build an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. |
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. |
ET-MIER: Entity Type-guided Key Mention Identification and Evidence Retrieval for Document-level Relation Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work does not fully distinguish the contribution of different mentions to entity representation and the importance of mentions in evidence sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction task that uses entity mentions to identify relations between entities in a text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on widely-adopted datasets. |
An Adaptive Logical Rule Embedding Model for Inductive Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) are incomplete and therefore lack interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable temporal knowledge graph reasoning model that captures deep causal logic by learning rule embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the ICEWS14, ICEW0515 and ICEw18 datasets. |