Papers by Xin Zhou

141 papers
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Are U a Joke Master? Pun Generation via Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning towards a Humor LLM (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Cross Copy Network for Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Rethinking Sample Polarity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
CODE-MVP: Learning to Represent Source Code from Multiple Views with Contrastive Pre-Training (2022.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
F2RL: Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning Framework for Claim-Guided Evidence-Supported Counterspeech Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Diffusion-NAT: Self-Prompting Discrete Diffusion for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation (2024.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Hierarchical Modeling of Global Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ProofInfer: Generating Proof via Iterative Hierarchical Inference (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
PokeMQA: Programmable knowledge editing for Multi-hop Question Answering (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LFKQG: A Controlled Generation Framework with Local Fine-tuning for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation Models (2026.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Table-to-Text Framework with Heterogeneous Multidominance Attention and Self-Evaluated Multi-Pass Deliberation (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Intent-Aware and Hate-Mitigating Counterspeech Generation via Dual-Discriminator Guided LLMs (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Not The End of Story: An Evaluation of ChatGPT-Driven Vulnerability Description Mappings (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ViCor: Bridging Visual Understanding and Commonsense Reasoning with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Coarse-to-fine Few-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
On the Human-level Performance of Visual Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ConNER: Consistency Training for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DATA-CUBE: Data Curriculum for Instruction-based Sentence Representation Learning (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Enhancing Cross-lingual Prompting with Dual Prompt Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
BERT-MK: Integrating Graph Contextualized Knowledge into Pre-trained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Great~Truths~are ~Always ~Simple: A Rather Simple Knowledge Encoder for Enhancing the Commonsense Reasoning Capacity of Pre-Trained Models (2022.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization with Reward Co-Evolution for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
HyperText: Endowing FastText with Hyperbolic Geometry (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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%.
MELM: Data Augmentation with Masked Entity Language Modeling for Low-Resource NER (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Understanding Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment through Reward Consistency (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ViFT: Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
RV-Syn: Rational and Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis based on Structured Function Library (2026.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

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).
Relation-aware Video Reading Comprehension for Temporal Language Grounding (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MedWriter: Knowledge-Aware Medical Text Generation (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in LLMs from an Unveiling Perspective of Safety Decision Boundary (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Sentiment Analysis on Streaming User Reviews via Dual-Channel Dynamic Graph Neural Network (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Extracting and Combining Abilities For Building Multi-lingual Ability-enhanced Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
ACE: A LLM-based Negotiation Coaching System (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Pan More Gold from the Sand: Refining Open-domain Dialogue Training with Noisy Self-Retrieval Generation (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
World to Code: Multi-modal Data Generation via Self-Instructed Compositional Captioning and Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Getting the Most out of Simile Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Learning “O” Helps for Learning More: Handling the Unlabeled Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (P19-3)

Copied to clipboard

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.
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MANBench: Is Your Multimodal Model Smarter than Human? (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LSSF: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models through Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusion (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Continual Pre-training of Language Models for Math Problem Understanding with Syntax-Aware Memory Network (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
WebQuality: A Large-scale Multi-modal Web Page Quality Assessment Dataset with Multiple Scoring Dimensions (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Navigation as Attackers Wish? Towards Building Robust Embodied Agents under Federated Learning (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
PEGRL: Improving Machine Translation by Post-Editing Guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MERIT: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
GiFT: Gibbs Fine-Tuning for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Battling against Tough Resister: Strategy Planning with Adversarial Game for Non-collaborative Dialogues (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
MAKI: Multi-layer Aligned Knowledge Injection for Structure-aware Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Towards Identifying Social Bias in Dialog Systems: Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Compilable Neural Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Reefknot: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Relation Hallucination Evaluation, Analysis and Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Towards Building More Robust NER datasets: An Empirical Study on NER Dataset Bias from a Dataset Difficulty View (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Chain-of-Rewrite: Aligning Question and Documents for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Rewriting the Code: A Simple Method for Large Language Model Augmented Code Search (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LogicPoison: Logical Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
ReasoningLM: Enabling Structural Subgraph Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Leveraging Capsule Routing to Associate Knowledge with Medical Literature Hierarchically (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Not Everything is All You Need: Toward Low-Redundant Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Rethinking Negative Pairs in Code Search (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Coupling Context Modeling with Zero Pronoun Recovering for Document-Level Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Variational Approach to Weakly Supervised Document-Level Multi-Aspect Sentiment Classification (N19-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations