Papers by Xu Zhao
VANE: Guiding High-Value Exploration in RLVR via Outcome-Process Novelty Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on large-scale mathematical reasoning and out-of-distribution tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantifies novelty across the outcome space and semantic process space by using reward or solution divergence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2.5-Math-7B demonstrate the proposed method is general and efficient. |
Mask-then-Fill: A Flexible and Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Event Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods for event extraction are costly and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that randomly masks out an adjunct sentence fragment and infills a variable-length text span with a fine-tuned infilling model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate more diverse data while keeping the original structure unchanged . it can replace a fragment of arbitrary length in the text with another fragment of variable length . |
Consistent Representation Learning for Continual Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train relation extraction models overfit memory samples and perform poorly on imbalanced datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses contrastive learning and knowledge distillation to train a model on data with new relations while avoiding forgetting old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and yields strong robustness on the imbalanced datasets. |
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
Neural Topic Modeling with Large Language Models in the Loop (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in topic discovery, but their direct application to topic modeling suffers from issues such as incomplete topic coverage, misalignment of topics, and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop framework that integrates Large Language Models with Neural Topic Models (NTMs) global topics and document representations are learned through the NTM, while an LLM refines these topics using an Optimal Transport (OT)-based alignment objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves topic interpretability while preserving the efficiency of existing NTMs. |
Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance . we propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages to select silver labels for cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two cross-lingual tasks by 10 F1 on average and 2.5 accuracy on natural language inference (NLI). |
The Design and Construction of a Chinese Sarcasm Dataset (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sarcasm datasets are limited to English and Chinese . sarcasm is a multi-layered semi-conscious language phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a high-quality Chinese sarcasm dataset using user comments . they use manual annotated sarkastic texts and non-sarcastic texts to train sarcasm classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 2,486 manual annotated sarcastic texts and 89,296 non-sarcatic texts. |
CLaw: Benchmarking Chinese Legal Knowledge in Large Language Models - A Fine-grained Corpus and Reasoning Analysis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark is designed to evaluate LLMs on Chinese legal knowledge and its application in reasoning . general pre-training that ingests legal texts without specialized focus compromises reliability of LLM responses . achieving trustworthy legal reasoning in LLM requires a robust synergy of accurate knowledge retrieval and strong general reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically engineered to evaluate LLMs on Chinese legal knowledge and its application in reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs on Chinese legal knowledge and its application in reasoning. |
Infusing Hierarchical Guidance into Prompt Tuning: A Parameter-Efficient Framework for Multi-level Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-level implicit discourse relation recognition (MIDRR) aims at identifying hierarchical discourse relations among arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based multi-level implicit discourse relation recognition framework that leverages parameter-efficient prompt tuning to drive inputted arguments to match the pre-trained space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable results on PDTB 2.0 and 3.0 using about 0.1% trainable parameters compared with baselines. |
TC–RAG: Turing–Complete RAG’s Case study on Medical LLM Systems (2025.acl-long)
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Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Rihong Qiu, Haoyu Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Hao Chen, Wentao Zhang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yuchen Fang, Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RAG neglect system state variables, resulting in poor performance and erroneous knowledge accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates a Turing Complete System to manage state variables and manage retrieval halting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on seven real-world healthcare datasets and shows that it is more accurate than existing methods. |
MSEarth: A Multimodal Benchmark for Earth Science Phenomenon Discovery with MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
Low-Resource Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction by Data Augmentation with Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to predict comparative opinion quintuples from comparative sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-resource approach to extract comparative opinion quintuples from comparative sentences . they propose augmentation using ChatGPT and a data-centric approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the existing pipeline-based method and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage (2026.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Fangze Li, Mingtao Xu, Feifan Meng, Shiju Zhao, Tiancheng Hu, Ting Peng, Anmin Liu, Wenrui Huang, Chenxu Liu, Ziyue Hua, Tao Xie
| Challenge: | Prior work typically decomposes inference into prefill and decode stages, with the decode stage dominating total latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that detects threshold where information loss exceeds information gain during sparse decoding to reduce token consumption by up to 90% and a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces token consumption by 90% with a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2% across reasoning-intensive benchmarks. |
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity due to their lack of knowledge hallucination and lack of a coherent model. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised quantized representation method to compress KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes that align the format of language sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing unsupervised methods producing more distinguishable codes on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks. |
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. |
Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the role of immersion and agency in interactive drama. |
| Approach: | They propose a playwriting-guided generation method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves storytelling quality and immersion and agency, while allowing agents to refine their reactions to align with the player’s intentions. |
Document-Level Event Argument Extraction With a Chain Reasoning Paradigm (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments beyond sentence level, where a significant challenge is to model long-range dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain reasoning paradigm which captures long-range interdependence due to the chains’ compositional nature and generates decomposable first-order logic rules for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on two benchmarks and is robust enough to defend against adversarial attacks. |
Understanding and Preventing Entropy Collapse in RLVR with On-Policy Entropy Flow Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RLVR algorithms suffer from entropy collapse, leading to premature determinism and unstable optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive entropy flow balancing mechanism that rescales entropic-increasing and enotro-decreazing updates according to their contributions to enthroy change. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing RLVR algorithms on six reasoning benchmarks. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection for pure texts have limited results to multi-modal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal stance detection framework that leverages target information to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal stance detection on five datasets based on Twitter . |
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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Feiteng Fang, Liang Zhu, Xi Feng, Jinchang Hou, Qixuan Zhao, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless" |
WavRAG: Audio-Integrated Retrieval Augmented Generation for Spoken Dialogue Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG frameworks rely on Automatic Speech Recognition to process speech input, which discards crucial audio information and increases computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval augmented generation framework with native, end-to-end audio support that integrates audio and text into a unified knowledge representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform 10x faster than current pipelines while delivering 10x acceleration. |
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity (2026.findings-acl)
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Zheyuan Yang, Liqiang Shang, Junjie Chen, Xun Yang, Chenglong Xu, Bo Yuan, Chenyuan Jiao, Yaoru Sun, Yilun Zhao
| Challenge: | TableVista evaluates multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity . current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combined with visually integrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on visual and structural complexity. |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
Generate-on-Graph: Treat LLM as both Agent and KG for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen, Zihao Wang, Yangqiu Song, Hanghang Tong, Guang Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) however, these methods are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to address insufficient knowledge and hallucination issues in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two datasets. |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
SimulSpeech: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech to Text Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | SimulSpeech is an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system . conventional approaches to simultaneous speech translation divide the translation process into two stages . |
| Approach: | They develop an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system which translates speech in source language to text in target language concurrently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves reasonable BLEU scores and lower delay compared to full-sentence translation model. |
Uncovering Scaling Laws for Large Language Models via Inverse Problems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Arun Verma, Zhaoxuan Wu, Zijian Zhou, Xiaoqiang Lin, Zhiliang Chen, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Rui Qiao, Jingtan Wang, Nhung Bui, Xinyuan Niu, Wenyang Hu, Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Zi-Yu Khoo, Zitong Zhao, Xinyi Xu, Apivich Hemachandra, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | inverse problems can efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs, authors argue . authors propose brute-force approaches to improve LLM training costs due to high costs . |
| Outcome: | This paper advocates that inverse problems can efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs to achieve the desirable performance with significantly better cost-effectiveness. |
From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ling Shi, Xinwei Wu, Xiaohu Zhao, Hao Wang, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Deyi Xiong, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | Recent research in mechanistic interpretability has revealed that Large Language models contain disentangled, human-understandable components. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that first identifies causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects “Feature-Resonant Data” that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks while using only 50% of the data. |
BERT-EMD: Many-to-Many Layer Mapping for BERT Compression with Earth Mover’s Distance (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been proposed and applied to many NLP tasks, yielding state-of-the-art performance, but high storage and computational costs obstruct them to be effectively deployed on resource-constrained devices and real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a BERT distillation method which allows each intermediate student layer to learn from any intermediate teacher layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn from different teacher layers adaptively for different NLP tasks. |
IPED: An Implicit Perspective for Relational Triple Extraction based on Diffusion Model (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract relational triples have inherent shortcomings such as redundant information and incomplete triple recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose an Implicit Perspective for relational triple Extraction based on Diffusion model that uses block coverage to complete tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while gaining low computational complexity. |
A Chain-of-Task Framework for Instruction Tuning of LLMs Based on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) tasks are based on large scale labeled data, which leads to extremely high data annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Task framework to reduce over-correction in large language models . they propose supervised fine-tuning strategy and an algorithm for automatic dataset annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on both FCGEC (in-domain) and NaCGEC (out-of domain) test sets. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
Unleashing the Power of Language Models in Text-Attributed Graph (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on graph learning on text-attributed graphs have been limited by memory cost and underutilization of relationships between nodes and words. |
| Approach: | They propose a Node Representation Update Pre-training Architecture based on Co-modeling text and graph to learn representations of papers and words simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the ogbn-arxiv benchmark dataset. |
CrowdAgent: Multi-Agent Managed Multi-Source Annotation System (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Maosheng Qin, Renyu Zhu, Mingxuan Xia, null Chenchenkai, Zhen Zhu, Minmin Lin, Junbo Zhao, Lu Xu, Changjie Fan, Runze Wu, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to annotate data focus on labeling, but lack holistic process control . a novel system that integrates task assignment, data annotation, and quality/cost management is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent system that integrates task assignment, data annotation, and quality/cost management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system automates human management by using a collaborative multi-agent system. |
Beyond Linguistic Cues: Fine-grained Conversational Emotion Recognition via Belief-Desire Modelling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is essential for dialogue systems to identify the emotions expressed by speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates both belief and desire to accurately identify emotions by extracting emotion-eliciting events from utterances and construct graphs that represent beliefs and desires in conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four popular ERC datasets and validates its performance with multiple state-of-the-art models. |
Embodied Executable Policy Learning with Language-based Scene Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language models with text inputs lack the capability to evolve with non-expert interactions with environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel learning paradigm that generates robots’ executable actions in the form of text, derived solely from visual observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm surpasses baselines and can adapt to the target tasks effectively. |
Unsupervised Multi-scale Expressive Speaking Style Modeling with Hierarchical Context Information for Audiobook Speech Synthesis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that expressiveness of audiobooks is limited by the averaged global-scale speaking style representation. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised multi-scale context-sensitive text-to-speech model for audiobooks . they use hierarchical context encoder to predict global-scale contextual style embeddings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a real-world Mandarin audio dataset. |
A Two-Agent Game for Zero-shot Relation Triplet Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation triplet extraction rely on labeled data and are limited in their applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-agent game approach to deliberate and debate unseen relations by two agents, a generator and an extractor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods by 6%-16% in F1 scores. |
Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Global and Local Semantic Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the ability of MLLMs to generate single tokens one by one, while lacking studies about how their representation vectors can encode global multimodal information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-caption corpus to train Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they find that the topmost layers encode more global semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can encode more global semantic information, rather than the topmost layers, and perform better on visual-language entailment tasks. |
Query2Triple: Unified Query Encoding for Answering Diverse Complex Queries over Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a challenge task of Knowledge Graphs due to incompleteness of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a query embedding approach that decouples the training for simple and complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decouples training for simple and complex queries and achieves state-of-the-art performance over three public benchmarks. |
Revisiting Over-Smoothness in Text to Speech (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive text to speech models ignore correlation in time and frequency domains, causing blurry results. |
| Approach: | They revisit the problem of over-smoothness in non-autoregressive text to speech models . they use methods that reduce complexity of data distributions and improve modeling methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve better voice quality and faster inference speed than autoregressive models. |
ESCP: Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speech and Contextual Prefixes (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) aims to analyze the speaker’s emotional state in a conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a directed acyclic graph and contextual prefixes to model historical utterances in a conversation and incorporate a contextual prefixed containing sentiment and semantics of historical . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several public benchmarks. |
Extrapolating Multilingual Understanding Models as Multilingual Generators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual understanding models are not capable of generating high-quality text compared with decoder-based causal language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt a multilingual encoder to a language generator with a small number of additional parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms initialization-based methods with 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation. |
Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion from Hierarchical Perspective (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require only a few associative triples to complete a relationship. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform data augmentation from two perspectives to solve the FKGC problem by inferring new triple facts from existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a number of existing models. |
Can Language Models Serve as Temporal Knowledge Bases? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have only considered language models as knowledge bases in a static setting . memorizing conflicting information is still challenging for LMs and hinders memorization of other unrelated one-to-one relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose two requirements for treating language models as temporal knowledge bases . they propose a dataset which is aimed at probing temporally-scoped knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can store conflicting information and use stored knowledge for temporal knowledge queries. |
Beta Distribution Guided Aspect-aware Graph for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis with Affective Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect category sentiment analysis do not necessarily occur in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Beta Distribution-guided aspect-aware graph construction based on external knowledge . they use aspect-related words as the pivots to derive aspect-relevant weights . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 6 benchmark datasets. |
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. |
An Auxiliary Task Boosted Multi-task Learning Method for Service Account Retrieval with Limited Human Annotation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to service account retrieval have limited human annotation, resulting in labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Auxiliary task Boosted Multi-Task Learning method which introduces multiple auxiliary tasks and enhances the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method for training LLMs on long sequences with high throughput and memory efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint compared to baseline methods . it trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs . |
EPiDA: An Easy Plug-in Data Augmentation Framework for High Performance Text Classification (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data augmentation do not fully exploit the potential of DA in NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy and plug-in framework for data augmentation to support effective text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in most cases, but not using agent networks or pre-trained generation networks. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
RoseRAG: Robust Retrieval-augmented Generation with Small-scale LLMs via Margin-aware Preference Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but face high computational costs and latency, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust RAG framework for large language models via Margin-aware Preference Optimization to enhance the accuracy and reliability of SLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on three open-domain question answering tasks. |
An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge for LLM Evaluation: Fine-tuned Judge Model is not a General Substitute for GPT-4 (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have fine-tuned judge models based on open-source LLMs to evaluate the quality of other LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source LLMs to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) their empirical results show that the models underperform GPT-4 in several dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GPT-4 on several dimensions including generalizability, fairness and adaptability. |
PreP-OCR: A Complete Pipeline for Document Image Restoration and Enhanced OCR Accuracy (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines that combine document image restoration with semantic-aware post-OCR correction can improve text extraction from degraded images. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage pipeline that combines document image restoration with semantic-aware post-OCR correction to enhance both visual clarity and textual consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline reduces character error rates by 63.9-70.3% on 13,831 pages of real historical documents in English, French, and Spanish compared to OCR on raw images. |
3DS: Medical Domain Adaptation of LLMs via Decomposed Difficulty-based Data Selection (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang, Runchuan Zhu, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Weibin Liao, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Effective domain adaptation typically involves supervised fine-tuning on carefully selected instruction-tuned data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-centric data selection framework that aligns data selection with the model’s knowledge distribution to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by up to 2.97% accuracy in the healthcare domain. |
Language Models can be Deductive Solvers (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel language model that internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented language models and few-shot prompting methods on public deductive reasoning benchmarks. |
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
| Challenge: | Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces . |
One Time of Interaction May Not Be Enough: Go Deep with an Interaction-over-Interaction Network for Response Selection in Dialogues (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, retrieval-based dialogues are performed in shallow ways . a recent study investigated the problem of context-response matching in open-domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that lets utterance-response interaction go deep by stacking interaction blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark data sets. |
Dialogue-oriented Pre-training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PrLMs) have shown impressive improvements for various downstream tasks including various dialogue related ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to simulate dialogue features on general plain text with common language model training objectives to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is fine-tuned on three public multi-turn dialogue datasets and achieves significant and consistent improvement over the plain PrLMs. |
LLM-Driven Knowledge Injection Advances Zero-Shot and Cross-Target Stance Detection (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection focus on background information and not on the accompanying input texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt Large Language Models to explicitly extract the relationship between paired text and unseen target as contextual knowledge and inject it into a generation model BART to exploit the rich contexts and semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to detect stance labels in zero-shot and cross-target scenarios. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Turning Failures into Value: Negative Experience Replay for RLVR via Confidence Gating and Boundary Failure Sampling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing experience replay methods for RLVR ignore sample inefficiency . expensive reasoning trajectories are discarded immediately after a single gradient update . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to replay failure trajectories to improve model refinement . they propose 'nexGRPO' which employs mid-confidence gating to filter invalid noise and saturated errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baaselines and achieves improved out-of-distribution generalization. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
Bayesian Optimization for Controlled Image Editing via LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Chengkun Cai, Haoliang Liu, Xu Zhao, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, John Lee, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | achieving precise control over generated content and maintaining semantic consistency remain significant limitations, particularly concerning grounding techniques and the necessity for model fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-the-shelf approach that integrates Large Language Models with Bayesian Optimization to facilitate precise and user-friendly image editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in editing accuracy and semantic preservation, as validated using different LLMs including Claude3 and GPT-4. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
Document-Level Relation Extraction with Sentences Importance Estimation and Focusing (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction models are not robust and exhibit bizarre behaviors when non-evidence sentences are removed. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction framework that uses a sentence importance score and a focusing loss to encourage DocRE models to focus on evidence sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves overall performance and makes DocRE models more robust. |
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (2024.acl-long)
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Le Zhuo, Zewen Chi, Minghao Xu, Heyan Huang, Jianan Zhao, Heqi Zheng, Conghui He, Xian-Ling Mao, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks and induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal large language model (LLM) that can handle protein-centric and protein-language tasks by using a dynamic protein mounting mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict proteins from a vast pool of candidates and can also predict natural language and biological papers. |
Can Large Language Models Be Good Language Teachers? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their potential as effective language teachers remains inadequately assessed. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate Chinese language teachers' pedagogical competence against international standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 13 latest multilingual and Chinese LLMs against international standards for Chinese language teachers. |
Sparse Activation Editing for Reliable Instruction Following in Narratives (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to capture the challenges of instruction following in complex narrative contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that identifies and edits instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions without requiring labelled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following by identifying and editing instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions, without requiring labelled data. |
kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning (2024.naacl-long)
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Wenting Zhao, Ye Liu, Yao Wan, Yibo Wang, Qingyang Wu, Zhongfen Deng, Jiangshu Du, Shuaiqi Liu, Yunlong Xu, Philip Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in task-oriented parsing involve formulating the task as a sequence-to-sequence problem, relying on a wealth of labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented parsing framework that integrates nearest-neighbor learning with a nearest-nearest approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to synthesize computer programs based on a natural-language prompt without additional data or specialized prompts. |
M2PA: A Multi-Memory Planning Agent for Open Worlds Inspired by Cognitive Theory (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Xiaodong Li, Yuntao Liu, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jinlong Tian, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Open-world planning poses a challenge due to complex environments and task diversity . recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) lack the ability to connect to agents' experiences . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-world multi-memory planning agent that combines large language models with human-like multi-mesh systems to leverage their strengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art agents on 50 Minecraft tasks in zero-shot learning. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
Beyond Ranking: Fine-Grained Diagnostics and Self-Improvement for MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current paradigms rely on holistic scoring and static leaderboards to disentangle fine-grained competencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to shift the focus from ranking to fine-grained diagnosis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the strongest baseline by 7.92%. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing controllable dialogue generation models focus on single attribute and lack generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional generalization model that learns from seen attributes and generalizes to unseen combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. |
CTCC: A Robust and Stealthy Fingerprinting Framework for Large Language Models via Cross-Turn Contextual Correlation Backdoor (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fingerprinting model ownership traces are vulnerable to illegal plagiarism and are not reliable. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-driven fingerprinting framework that encodes contextual correlations across multiple dialogue turns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves stronger stealth and robustness than previous work. |
Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Dialogue Policy with Graph Convolutional Q-network (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deep reinforcement learning lack the ability to learn the relationship between dialogue states and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-structured dialogue policy framework for task-oriented dialogue systems that uses bipartite graphs to construct two different bipartites and generate user-related and knowledge-related subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the effectiveness and stability of dialogue policies. |
Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for narrative understanding fail to represent complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives using large-scale large-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extracts and analyses character relation graphs from detective narratives using advanced Large Language Models like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2 . |
The Role of Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Haoliang Liu, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet their reliability in problem-solving remains debatable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches to enhance LLM reasoning by progressively adapting its reasoning pathways based on problem complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 70.3% accuracy on AIW, compared to 62.2% for Tree of Thought, while maintaining lower computational costs. |
Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion (2026.findings-acl)
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Tian Lan, Felix Henry, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Junyang Ren, Qihang PU, Haijun Li, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states within one plain-text context is inherently fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems. |
DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.x. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.k. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan, Zhifang Sui, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures face challenges in ensuring expert specialization . despite the promising performance, scaling language models to an extremely large scale is associated with exceedingly high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for ultimate expert specialization by segmenting experts into mN ones and activating mK from them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable performance with GShard with 2B parameters and computation. |
OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Haowei Zhang, Shengyun Si, Yilun Zhao, Lujing Xie, Zhijian Xu, Lyuhao Chen, Linyong Nan, Pengcheng Wang, Xiangru Tang, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation are limited and benchmarked on a limited number of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source tools to reproduce existing large language models for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares existing large language models on 9 table-to-text generation datasets and maintains a leaderboard to provide insights for future work. |
TIE: Topological Information Enhanced Structural Reading Comprehension on Web Pages (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for structural reading comprehension (SRC) only focus on comprehension of plain text, tables, tables or knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a topological information enhanced model which transforms a token-level task into a tag-level one by introducing a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. |
HyKGE: A Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced RAG Framework for Accurate and Reliable Medical LLMs Responses (2025.acl-long)
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Xinke Jiang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Rihong Qiu, Yue Fang, Zhiyuan Wang, Jinyi Tang, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Recent approaches suffer from insufficient and repetitive knowledge retrieval, tedious and time-consuming query parsing, and monotonous knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework which leverages LLMs’ powerful reasoning capacity to compensate for the incompleteness of user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining the rich knowledge of LLMs with Hypothesis Outputs. |
ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas . a new architecture, ShadowGNN, processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels . |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models on a text-to-sql benchmark . it uses domain-independent representations to extract logical linking between question and schema . |
Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognitive framework that enables step-level error detection and self-correction in Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Who When benchmark and delivers consistent gains on AgentErrorBench. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
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Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
PITA: Prompting Task Interaction for Argumentation Mining (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation mining (AM) aims to detect arguments and their inherent relations from textual compositions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to model the inter-relationships among three subtasks within a generative framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks. |
Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Information Extraction via Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Zhenxi Lin, Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks are a fundamental component of medical NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adaptive constraint strategy to adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach selectively enhances the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs. |
ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiqi Zhang, Xinbei Ma, Yunqing Xu, Zouying Cao, Pengrui Lu, Haobo Yuan, Tiancheng Shen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Ming-Hsuan Yang
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
Principled Understanding of Generalization for Generative Transformer Models in Arithmetic Reasoning Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models excel in arithmetic reasoning but their generalization capabilities are incompletely understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical framework for understanding the generalization behaviors of transformers in arithmetic tasks, focusing on length generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict generalization behaviors in transformers with a high translation invariance and base mismatch in modular operations. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
LLM-Enhanced Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step E-Commerce Payment Fraud Risk Detection (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce payment fraud detection is a new area for reinforcement learning (RL) and Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate reinforcement learning (RL) with Large Language Models (LLMs) by framing transaction risk as a multi-step Markov Decision Process (MDP), RL optimizes risk detection across multiple payment stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves fraud detection accuracy and demonstrates zero-shot capability. |
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. |
Enhancing Character-Level Understanding in LLMs through Token Internal Structure Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Zhu Xu, Zhiqiang Zhao, Zihan Zhang, Yuchi Liu, Quanwei Shen, Fei Liu, Yu Kuang, Jian He, Conglin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) use tokenization methods but often obscure internal character structures within tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that improves models’ ability to capture character positions within tokens by training them on reverse character prediction tasks using the tokenizer’s vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves position prediction accuracy in large language models, enabling more precise identification of target characters in original text. |
MIND: From Passive Mimicry to Active Reasoning through Capability-Aware Multi-Perspective CoT Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Jin Cui, Jiaqi Guo, Jiepeng Zhou, Ruixuan Yang, Jiayi Lu, Jiajun Xu, Jiangcheng Song, Boran Zhao, Pengju Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently, causing suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction and employ a feedback-driven inertia calibration mechanism to align supervision with the student’s current adaptability. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of distribution benchmarks. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
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. |
A Study of Non-autoregressive Model for Sequence Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive (NAR) models generate all tokens in parallel, resulting in faster generation speed compared to autoregressive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation and source-target alignment to bridge the gap between NAR and autoregressive models in various tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques can speed up NAR models in some tasks but not all . the proposed techniques reduce target token dependency while allowing for faster inference . |
M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Bo Zeng, Liangying Shao, Yichen Dong, Xinwei Wu, Jiang Zhou, Tianyu Dong, Xiangxiang Zeng, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | prevailing methods for machine translation are often hindered by misleading reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns large language models to human preferences . they propose 'M2PO' to correct the bias towards partial errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models and achieves parity with proprietary models. |
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MMDialog is a dataset of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a curated set of 1.08 million dialogues with 1.53 million unique images to generalize the open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict responses to multi-modal content with state-of-the-art techniques and measure their performance. |
Incremental Summarization for Customer Support via Progressive Note-Taking and Agent Feedback (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Using a mixtral-87B model, we reduce the time it takes to generate concise notes during conversations, and reduce the amount of time spent on manual review. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that combines a Mixtral-87B model for continuous note generation with a DeBERTa-based classifier to filter trivial content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieved a 3% reduction in case handling time compared to bulk summarization, and high agent satisfaction ratings from surveys. |
Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly and require manual evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered framework that automates the entire evaluation process using LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 92.14% correlation with human preferences, surpassing all previous expert-annotated benchmarks without any manual efforts. |
Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Cen Zhao, Tiantian Zhang, Hanchen Su, Yufeng Zhang, Shaowei Su, Mingzhi Xu, Yu Liu, Wei Han, Jeremy Werner, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad
| Challenge: | Existing offline approaches to improve an LLM-based customer support system rely on batch annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-in-the-loop framework that integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retraining cycles from months to weeks by integrating four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations. |
AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research (2025.acl-long)
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Yilun Zhao, Weiyuan Chen, Zhijian Xu, Manasi Patwardhan, Chengye Wang, Yixin Liu, Lovekesh Vig, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | a benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in designing ablation studies for scientific research is available online. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to design ablation studies . they investigate whether current automated evaluation methods are not reliable . |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared leading LLMs with human experts on generating detailed ablation study designs . the results show that current evaluation methods are not reliable for the task . |
LoRA-drop: Efficient LoRA Parameter Pruning based on Output Evaluation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is currently the most commonly used PEFT method for fine-tuning models with billions of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use low-rank Adaptation to evaluate LoRA parameter features and then retain LoRA for important layers and the other layers share the same LoRA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable performance to full fine-tuning and LoRA while retaining 50% of the LoRA parameters on average. |
ITAKE: Interactive Unstructured Text Annotation and Knowledge Extraction System with LLMs and ModelOps (2024.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Unstructured text data contains a large amount of valuable knowledge, but there are many tools that do not meet the needs of actual business. |
| Approach: | They propose an unstructured text annotation and knowledge extraction system that integrates Large Language Models and ModelOps to improve model supervision and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system integrates large language models and ModelOps to improve performance in low-resource contexts. |
Generating Temporally-ordered Event Sequences via Event Optimal Transport (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal event ordering and event infilling ignore the global semantics of events, and the model adopts a word-level objective to model events in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event ordering and event infilling task using a model that uses maximum likelihood estimation to model events in texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on all evaluation datasets. |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Yimin Deng, Yejing Wang, Zhenxi Lin, Zichuan Fu, Guoshuai Zhao, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xian Wu, Li Zhu, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal reasoning are limited and apply a fixed pipeline to all questions. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive temporal reasoning method that dynamically executes reasoning steps based on context and task requirements. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two temporal QA benchmarks show the proposed method works. |
Robustness of Learning from Task Instructions (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. |
| Approach: | a new study investigates the system robustness when instructions are manipulated and paraphrased . task instructions give the model the definition of the task and allow it to output the appropriate answer . |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that supervised learning is robust when instructions are manipulated, paraphrased or iii from different levels of conciseness. |
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 . |
Ruleformer: Context-aware Rule Mining over Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on rule mining focuses on mining rules, but how to select appropriate rules for completion of different triplets has not been discussed. |
| Approach: | They propose to take context information into consideration when selecting suitable rules . they devise a transformer-based rule mining approach, Ruleformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model takes context information into consideration, which helps select suitable rules for inference tasks. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
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Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information retrieval (IR) is an indispensable technique for locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large-scale retrieval benchmarks on web searches and low-resource retrieval tasks. |
Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large audio-language models focus on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations, but they assume that inputs remain semantically answerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation setting distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
Generating and Evaluating Plausible Explanations for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing XAI approaches focus on learning algorithmic explanations, but are not plausible for users. |
| Approach: | They propose a path-based explanation method that meets human-centric explainability constraints and enhances plausibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method meets human-centric explainability constraints and enhances plausibility. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
LLaSA: Large Language and Structured Data Assistant (2025.naacl-long)
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Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen, ZengXiangrong ZengXiangrong, Bingning Wang, Guang Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) tasks are a key part of many NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing LLMs' ability to handle structured data . they represent various types of structured data in a unified hypergraph format . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on SKG tasks using LoRA finetuning. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
DemoNSF: A Multi-task Demonstration-based Generative Framework for Noisy Slot Filling Task (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Guanting Dong, Tingfeng Hui, Zhuoma GongQue, Jinxu Zhao, Daichi Guo, Gang Zhao, Keqing He, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Recent prompt-based generative frameworks have shown impressive capabilities in sequence labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task demonstration-based generative framework for noisy slot filling that captures input perturbations at different granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and achieves strong generalization. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems rely on static, hand-crafted update rules for personalization, but sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory guideline optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
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. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Weilin Zhao, Yuxiang Huang, Xu Han, Wang Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Xinrong Zhang, Yewei Fang, Kaihuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative drafting, therefore generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better speedup. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses existing model to drafting and target LLM to verify draft in a low-cost parallel manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve speedups of up to 2.4 over speculative decoding and 3.9 over vanilla decoding without fine-tuning draft and target models. |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings. |
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. |
Awakening Augmented Generation: Learning to Awaken Internal Knowledge of Large Language Models for Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that Large Language Models model rich knowledge, but it is often not activated and awakened. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages richer context to enhance question answering . Explicit awakening fine-tunes a context generator to create a synthetic, compressed document that functions as symbolic context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics the human ability to answer questions using only thinking and recalling to compensate for knowledge gaps. |
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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Yuming Yang, Wantong Zhao, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Huiyuan Zheng, Yang Nan, Yuran Wang, Xueying Xu, Kaixin Huang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models struggle with complex entity taxonomies in open domains and lack NER capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages. |
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%. |
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)
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Yu-Zhe Shi, Shiqian Li, Xinyi Niu, Qiao Xu, Jiawen Liu, Yifan Xu, Shiyu Gu, Bingru He, Xinyang Li, Xinyu Zhao, Zijian Zhao, Yidong Lyu, Zhen Li, Sijia Liu, Lin Qiu, Jinhao Ji, Lecheng Ruan, Yuxi Ma, Wenjuan Han, Yixin Zhu
| Challenge: | PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives. |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning . they propose augmentation, evaluation frameworks to measure contextual forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye, Hong Gu, Xu Lu, Ruixuan Xiao, Bowen Bao, Yijing He, Liangyu Zha, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on simple, flat table structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of both Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs and Multimodal LLM models across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
PromISe: Releasing the Capabilities of LLMs with Prompt Introspective Search (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models use uniform manual prompts, resulting in underestimation of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt introspective search framework that integrates self-introspect and self-refine to unlock the capabilities of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the performance of 12 well-known LLMs compared to baseline methods. |
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, JingYuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. |
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuhang Zhou, Jing Zhu, Shengyi Qian, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiyao Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Ming Li, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | a new study proposes a domain-informed self-consistency policy optimization extension to GRPO that addresses inter-group imbalance. |
| Outcome: | a new extension of GRPO addresses inter-group imbalance with two key innovations . the proposed method outperforms existing GR PO variants by 5% on Qwen3 models . |
Revisiting Automated Evaluation for Long-form Table Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated metrics for long-form table question answering (LFTQA) are poorly correlated with human judgments and fail to distinguish between factually accurate responses and those that are factual incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a meta-evaluation dataset to assess the effectiveness of LLM-based LFTQA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta-evaluation dataset includes 2,988 human-annotated examples. |
SCCS: Semantics-Consistent Cross-domain Summarization via Optimal Transport Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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Jielin Qiu, Jiacheng Zhu, Mengdi Xu, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Zhaowen Wang, Bo Li, Ding Zhao, Hailin Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal summarization ignore the structure and semantics of the whole video and article. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-consistent cross-domain summarization model that extracts features from video and article and uses fusion methods to select representative one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces high-quality multimodal summaries on three MSMO datasets. |
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weihong Zhong, Xiaocheng Feng, Liang Zhao, Qiming Li, Lei Huang, Yuxuan Gu, Weitao Ma, Yuan Xu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from multimodal hallucinations . however, the generated hallucines could influence the models’ subsequent generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations and a method to revise the output distribution of LVLs with the one derived from the residual visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the performance of open-source LVLMs by 31%, indicating that they are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. |
POP-CEE: Position-oriented Prompt-tuning Model for Causal Emotion Entailment (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for emotion analysis in conversations ignore the specific semantic associations between emotions and cause utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a position-oriented prompt-tuning model to solve the CEE task in an end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark dataset. |
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained language models on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cloze-driven prompt framework for prompt tuning that implicitly stimulates knowledge from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art for prompt-based fine-tuning on few-shot NLU tasks. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
Augmentation, Retrieval, Generation: Event Sequence Prediction with a Three-Stage Sequence-to-Sequence Approach (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict event sequences are complex and ignore the knowledge of external events. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical induction problem to generate a sequence of events by exploring the similarity between the given goal and known sequences of events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an event sequence prediction task. |
DeepNote: Note-Centric Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Daren Zha, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Yixuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | . - (EN) |
| Approach: | . - (EN) |
| Outcome: | . - (EN) |
CLEAR: Can Language Models Really Understand Causal Graphs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models lack a conceptual framework for understanding causal graphs, but there is still potential for improvement. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to define causal graph understanding by assessing language models’ behaviors through four practical criteria derived from diverse disciplines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines three complexity levels and encompasses 20 causal graph-based tasks across 20 different levels. |
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding but their visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning that allows MLLMs to explore textual tokens while visual input remains fixed throughout reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong large models such as GPT-4o on high-resolution benchmarks and improves performance on a series of elaborate high-level benchmarks. |
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1. |
Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results indicate that pre-trained language models can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in both automatic evaluation and human judgment. |
| Approach: | They propose to equip a pre-trained language model with a knowledge selection module to generate knowledge-grounded dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in evaluation and human judgment. |
AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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Tiankai Yang, Yi Nian, Li Li, Ruiyao Xu, Yuangang Li, Jiaqi Li, Zhuo Xiao, Xiyang Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Kaize Ding, Xia Hu, Yue Zhao
| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates how large language models (LLMs) can help with NLP anomaly detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform zero-shot detection without tasks-specific training, data augmentation and model selection, and it can suggest unsupervised AD models. |
CLMLF:A Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion Method for Multimodal Sentiment Detection (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment detection do not consider token-level feature fusion. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for multimodal sentiment detection using a combination of text and image to encode and fuse token-level features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can fuse multimodal features with token-level features on three publicly available multimodal datasets. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Multi-modal Large Language Models via Image Token Attention-Guided Decoding (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) generate plausible but incorrect content, resulting in hallucinations . recent advances in MLLM technology have demonstrated their outstanding performance in a variety of visual tasks, such as object detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method which leverages MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations by analyzing input and output tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations. |
vONTSS: vMF based semi-supervised neural topic modeling with optimal transport (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent Neural Topic Models (NTMs) have limited applications in the real world due to the challenge of incorporating human knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised neural topic modeling method, vONTSS, which uses von Mises-Fisher variational autoencoders and optimal transport. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing semi-supervised topic modeling methods on multiple aspects. |
PsychEthicsBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Against Australian Mental Health Ethics (2026.findings-acl)
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Yaling Shen, Stephanie Fong, Yiwen Jiang, Zimu Wang, Feilong Tang, Qingyang Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Zhongxing Xu, Jiahe Liu, Jinpeng Hu, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
| Challenge: | Mental disorders affect nearly one in seven people worldwide, yet the vast majority do not receive adequate care. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ethical knowledge and behavioral responses through multiple-choice and open-ended tasks with fine-grained ethicality annotations. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results across 14 models reveal that refusal rates are poor indicators of ethical behavior, revealing a significant divergence between safety triggers and clinical appropriateness. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
BMInf: An Efficient Toolkit for Big Model Inference and Tuning (2022.acl-demo)
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Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhengyan Zhang, Jie Zhou, Jun Zhang, Jia Chao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for big model inference and tuning which can support big model tuning at extremely low computation cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can support big model inference and tuning at extremely low computation cost. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Liang, Junhan Zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Enhancing LLM-based Hatred and Toxicity Detection with Meta-Toxic Knowledge Graph (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address toxicity issues with large language models are inadequate . lack of domain-specific knowledge leads to false negatives and excessive sensitivity to toxic speech limits freedom of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages graph search on a meta-toxic knowledge graph to enhance hatred and toxicity detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers false positive rate and improves toxicity detection performance in out-of-domain scenarios. |
MuSC: Improving Complex Instruction Following with Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for complex instruction-following with elaborate constraints rely on a weaker model, especially GPT-4, limiting their application. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training framework to improve instruction alignment without relying on a stronger model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following with elaborate constraints without external supervision on coarse and fine granularity. |
Feedback Is The Key for Automated Survey Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a promising foundation for literature surveys, but guiding them to generate accurate, reliable content remains a fundamental challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-driven framework that incorporates feedback across three dimensions: outline feedback for structural clarity, citation feedback for evidence validation, and content feedback for readability and analytical depth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves both citation and content quality, demonstrating feedback as the critical mechanism for automatic survey generation. |
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. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lujie Niu, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Fangkun Zhao, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based Multi-Agent System benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. |
UniRel: Unified Representation and Interaction for Joint Relational Triple Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract rich correlations between entities and relations are not fully exploited by existing methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify entities and relations by jointly encoding them within a concatenated natural language sequence and unify the modeling of interactions with a proposed Interaction Map. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and efficient than existing methods and can be scaled up to 2021. |
Diagnosing and Remedying Representation Deficiencies for Deterministic Reasoning in KGQA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve non-deterministic reasoning problems in large language models are limited by their complexity and lack of a clear understanding of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to diagnose and correct non-deterministic reasoning behaviors in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and WebQSP benchmarks on the widely used WebQ SP and CWQ benchmarks. |
Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained language models overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-parameters Prompt Tuning method which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on six architectures and eight datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in performance and efficiency. |
OpenToM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing N-ToM benchmarks lack ambiguous and artificial narratives, lack of personality traits and preferences, and limited diversity in the questions posed. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM) with longer and clearer narrative stories, characters with explicit personality traits, actions triggered by character intentions, and questions designed to challenge LLMs’ abilities of modeling characters’ mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test aims to assess the performance of LLMs in the physical and psychological worlds. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Rethinking Data Mixing from the Perspective of Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Changwei Xu, XinLong Zhao, Jianing Hao, Ran Chen, Yang Liu, Ruijie Xu, Stephen Chen, Guang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mix data with LLMs have relied on domain definitions derived from intuition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reweighting framework that restructures data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GPT-2 models. |
ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing CCE methods treat contracts as plain text, creating a barrier to understanding complex contracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model implicit relations in legal contracts to improve contract understanding . they propose Term-Definition Relation captures the relation between important terms and their definitions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two CCE tasks in conventional and zero-shot settings. |
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 . |
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanle Zhao, Zilin Sang, Yuxuan Li, Qi Shi, Weilun Zhao, Shuo Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
Multi-modal Sarcasm Generation: Dataset and Solution (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on sarcasm generation do not consider generating sarcasastic descriptions for a given image with hashtags that provide the sarkastic target. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal Sarcasm generation task that generates sarcastic descriptions like humans using images, hashtags, and OCR tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate sarcastic descriptions like humans using 5000 images and Twitter text. |
ICL-Bandit: Relevance Labeling in Advertisement Recommendation Systems via LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lu Wang, Chiming Duan, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Yong Shi, Xuefeng Luo, Bingjing Xu, Weiwei Deng, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a common practice to enhance LLM performance on domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to enhance query-ad relevance labeling . they identify and provide superior demonstrations for ICL, thereby improving labeling performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves query-ad relevance labeling performance by providing demonstrations. |
DeMAC: Enhancing Multi-Agent Coordination with Dynamic DAG and Manager-Player Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models struggle to adapt to evolving task dependencies and to handle uncertainties. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Environment-Aware Manager-Player Agents Coordination framework that enhances multi-agent coordination through long-term strategic planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional reinforcement learning and human-agent collaboration in the Overcooked simulation. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
Review-Driven Multi-Label Music Style Classification by Exploiting Style Correlations (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Several methods have been proposed for automatic music style classification, but they are limited in two aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep learning approach to automatically learn and exploit style correlations by reviewing music reviews on websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs well in capturing style correlations. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
REG: Retrieval via Emotion Similarity for Guiding Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empathy relies on the cognitive capacity to relate to similar past experiences. Existing methods prioritize semantic similarity over emotion characteristics, leading to unempathetic responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates four Emotion Attributes into the retrieval process to ensure explicit emotional alignment. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that REG significantly outperforms baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic generation. |
One-Model-Connects-All: A Unified Graph Pre-Training Model for Online Community Modeling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruoxue Ma, Jiarong Xu, Xinnong Zhang, Haozhe Zhang, Zuyu Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing studies on integrating online community to solve social problems have not fully utilized these three components and the relationship among them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simultaneously considers communities, users, and texts and can easily connect with a variety of downstream tasks related to social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to perform violation detection, sentiment analysis, and community recommendation across multiple tasks. |
Double-Checker: Large Language Model as a Checker for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable performance on few-shot Named Entity Recognition tasks due to the high cost of obtaining high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the task into entity span detection and entity type classification using a type-independent entity span detector and then classify the detected spans based on their types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently yields improvements over two baseline approaches. |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
AntCritic: Argument Mining for Free-Form and Visually-Rich Financial Comments (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining is a thriving task in natural language processing, but its generalization is limited by existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to help model argument mining . the dataset AntCritic supports both argument component detection and argument relation prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect arguments and identify their relationships automatically. |
Measuring Your ASTE Models in The Wild: A Diversified Multi-domain Dataset For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing ASTE datasets are limited in their ability to represent real-world scenarios, hindering progress in this area. |
| Approach: | They propose a new ASTE dataset that is manually annotated to better fit real-world scenarios by providing more diverse and realistic reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is manually annotated to better fit real-world scenarios. |
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zijie Liu, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Qingyu Chen, Kaidi Xu, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
Mixture of Weight-shared Heterogeneous Group Attention Experts for Dynamic Token-wise KV Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for token-level KV optimization and grouping of tokens are inefficient and strain compute and storage resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-expert approach that dynamically optimizes token-wise computation and memory allocation by a token-based expert-choice routing mechanism guided by learned importance scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach retains all tokens while adaptively routing them to specialized experts with varying KV group sizes, balancing granularity and efficiency. |
Unilaw-R1: A Large Language Model for Legal Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning and Iterative Inference (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning-focused large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving across various domains, yet their capabilities in handling complex legal problems remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model tailored for legal reasoning with a 7-billion parameter scale and a two-stage training strategy combining Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all models of similar scale on authoritative benchmarks and outperformed Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct (46.6%) by an average margin of 6.6%. |
LoRE: Enhancing Search Relevance with Progressive Chain-of-Thought and Preference Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenji Lu, Zhuo Chen, Hui Zhao, Zhiyuan Zeng, Gang Zhao, Junjie Ren, null Lihaoran, Songyan Liu, Pengjie Wang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | E-commerce search relevance is a critical component of retrieval systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-generative model for search relevance that trains reasoning knowledge, multi-modal understanding and rule awareness into three core competencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-5 in Macro-F1 and achieves 27% online gain. |
A Contrastive Framework for Learning Sentence Representations from Pairwise and Triple-wise Perspective in Angular Space (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning sentence representations focus on constitution of positive and negative representation pairs and do not focus on training objective. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to learn sentence representations using BERT-like pre-trained models . they use a pairwise discriminating power and a model to model the entailment relation of triplet sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on diverse sentence related tasks. |
SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questions (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in the Knowledge Base Question Answering task. |
| Approach: | They introduce an expert-annotated KBQA dataset from Wikidata’s “Request a Query” forum with 320 decontextualized question-SPARQL pairs. |
| Outcome: | The SPINACH dataset outperforms baselines on the QALD-7, QADL-9 Plus and QAL-10 datasets by 31.0%, 27.0% and 10.0% in F1 respectively. |
Word-level Cross-lingual Structure in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a broad spectrum of cross-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Word-level Cross-lingual Structure to prove that the word-level embedding on the hidden layers isomorphic between languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on two representative LLM foundations, LLaMA2 and BLOOM. |
Jointly Learning Guidance Induction and Faithful Summary Generation via Conditional Variational Autoencoders (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for abstractive summarization generate factual consistency summaries with a high level of accuracy and coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that induces the guidance information and generates summary equipment with the guidance synchronously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates fluent summaries with no constraint on the words and phrases, and is more faithful than the existing state-of-the-art approaches. |
KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GUI agents have limited app-specific knowledge of complex mobile tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a 75.8% success rate and 84.6% decision accuracy test across mobile apps. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
Entity-level Interaction via Heterogeneous Graph for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for name-based entity recognition neglect the integrity of entity semantics and conduct cross-modal interaction at token-level. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal named entity recognition model that captures visual information and fuses it into tokens to rid non-entity tokens of visual noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures entity-related visual information and fuses it into tokens . it eliminates visual noise and makes non-entity tokens easily misidentified as entities . |
Knowledge Decoupling via Orthogonal Projection for Lifelong Editing of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models (LLMs) have achieved some success, but their knowledge understanding and memory capacity significantly degrades after extensive editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that stores the basis vectors of the representation space of past edits in a knowledge cache and projects the gradient of the current edit onto a space orthogonal to previous knowledge for updating. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves question-answering ability and hallucination mitigation by 14% and 61% for large language models after 3,000 edits. |
Token-wise Influential Training Data Retrieval for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used in various industries due to their unprecedented scale and impressive capabilities derived from the massive training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can estimate the influence of training data by caching and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can estimate the influence of training data within minutes, achieving over a speedup of 6,326x. |
A Multi-Expert Structural-Semantic Hybrid Framework for Unveiling Historical Patterns in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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Yimin Deng, Yuxia Wu, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Li Zhu, Qidong Liu, Derong Xu, Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph structure learning or semantic reasoning, lacking the capability to capture the inherent differences between historical and non-historical events. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning framework that integrates both structural and semantic information to guide the reasoning process for different events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates structural and semantic information to predict future events . it can provide evidence for many downstream tasks, including situation analysis and political decision making . |
Shuttle Between Symbolic Instructions and Neural Parameters of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Despite their distinct external representations, a deeper analysis reveals their intrinsic nature: instructions serve as a natural language compression devised by humans for data governing specific mapping patterns, whereas parameters act as 'neuro compression' of the same task data. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework to model and learn the bi-directional mappings between instructions and parameters of large language models by evaluating it on the tasks of instruction deduction and induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can map one of the instructions/parameters to the other by evaluating it on the tasks of instruction deduction and induction. |
A Federated Framework for LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in building generative recommendation systems through fine-tuning user behavior data. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated framework for LLM-based recommendation that combines dynamic parameter aggregation and learning speed for different clients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a more balanced client performance and improved overall performance in a computational and storage-efficient way while safeguarding user privacy well. |
Distinguish Confusing Law Articles for Legal Judgment Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assist legal judgment are limited and can't solve confusing charges issue. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to predict a legal judgment based on a textual description of the case and a graph neural network to learn subtle differences between confusing law articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn subtle differences between confusing law articles and extract effective discriminative features from fact descriptions. |
BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Baitao Gong, Yingfa Chen, Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Yanxu Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to compress medium-sized models for specific tasks have limited results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic compression toolkit for big models that implements quantization, pruning, distillation and MoEfication methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves performance on a model with 3 billion parameters by 12x . it also outperforms the original model on three typical NLP benchmarks. |
Bridging SFT and RL: Dynamic Policy Optimization for Robust Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unified optimization strategies overlook the statistical conflict between these distinct gradient signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reduce bias-variance trade-offs in Large Language Models . they propose DYPO, which leverages intrinsic group dynamics to significantly reduce RL gradient variance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional pipelines on reasoning benchmarks and out-of-distribution tasks. |
LexicalAT: Lexical-Based Adversarial Reinforcement Training for Robust Sentiment Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text classification models are fragile and sensitive to simple perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-classifier adversarial training approach to improve classification models . they use a large-scale lexical knowledge base to generate attacking examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and reduces test errors on neural networks. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension (2024.acl-long)
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Qian Yang, Jin Xu, Wenrui Liu, Yunfei Chu, Ziyue Jiang, Xiaohuan Zhou, Yichong Leng, Yuanjun Lv, Zhou Zhao, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for audio-centric interaction have impeded advancements in this field . AIR-Bench evaluates LALMs' ability to understand audio signals and interact with humans . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large audio-language models to understand audio signals . they use 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions to examine single-task ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large audio-language models to understand audio signals and interact with humans in the textual format. |
Continual Generalized Intent Discovery: Marching Towards Dynamic and Open-world Intent Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the generalized intent classification system only considers one stage of OOD learning and requires all IND data for joint training. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that detects OOD intents from dynamic OOD data streams . they propose CGID method that bootstraps new intent discovery through class prototypes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can detect out-of-domain (OOD) queries and extend them to the in-domain classifier . it can safely and efficiently detect out of-domain queries and avoid wrong operations . |
ECC: Synergizing Emotion, Cause and Commonsense for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Empathy improves human-machine dialogue systems by enhancing the user's experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages specialized encoders to capture the key features of emotion, cause, and commonsense and collaboratively models these through a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework outperforms baseline models and offers a robust solution for empathetic dialogue generation. |
Cross-lingual Multimodal Sentiment Analysis for Low-Resource Languages via Language Family Disentanglement and Rethinking Transfer (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods are limited to textual data and cannot handle multimodal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning framework that allows cross-lingual and cross-modal alignments and a language family disentanglement module that enhances the sharing of language universals within families. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods and can handle low-resource languages. |
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. |
Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types becomes a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an incremental novel slot detection task which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots; 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD and is highly effective. |
RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to combat character hallucination are vulnerable to attack . large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating responses inconsistent with intended personas . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defence strategy that generates supplemental context through narration to mitigate role-query conflicts and improve query generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defence strategy outperforms refusal-based strategies in character hallucinations and query generalization. |
RAVR: Reference-Answer-guided Variational Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that reinforcement learning (RL) can refine the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) but requires a key prerequisite: the model must already be able to generate high-utility reasoning paths with non-negligible probability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses answer-conditioned reasoning as a variational surrogate for question-only reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 benchmarks and 3 models show that RAVR reduces hesitation, strengthens conclusion consolidation, and promotes problem-specific strategies in reasoning. |
Integrating Representation Subspace Mapping with Unimodal Auxiliary Loss for Attention-based Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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Xulong Du, Xingnan Zhang, Dandan Wang, Yingying Xu, Zhiyuan Wu, Shiqing Zhang, Xiaoming Zhao, Jun Yu, Liangliang Lou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify emotions rely on a large modality gap in their representations . |
| Approach: | They propose a representation subspace mapping module that maps each modality into two distinct subspaces and a cross-modality attention module that leverages auxiliary loss to remove the noise unrelated to emotion classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art MER methods on the IEMOCAP and MSP-Improv datasets. |
Randomized Smoothing with Masked Inference for Adversarially Robust Text Classifications (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models are brittle against specifically crafted adversarial examples, leading to increasing interest in probing the adversariality of NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that combines randomized smoothing and masked inference to improve the adversarial robustness of NLP systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves adversarial robustness by 2 to 3 times over existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
WPO: Enhancing RLHF with Weighted Preference Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenxuan Zhou, Ravi Agrawal, Shujian Zhang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Sanqiang Zhao, Kaiqiang Song, Silei Xu, Chenguang Zhu
| Challenge: | Off-policy preference optimization suffers from a distributional gap between the policy used for data collection and the target policy, leading to suboptimal optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to simulate on-policy learning with off-police preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by up to 5.6% on Alpaca Eval 2 and MT-bench. |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks, stalling at early sub-goals. |
| Approach: | They propose to assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. |
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Liang Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the effects of positional encoding on length extrapolation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the extrapolation of large language models, but they are still lacking a systematic survey. |
Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach (2025.findings-acl)
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Yurong Wu, Fangwen Mu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jinjing Zhao, Xinrun Xu, Lingrui Mei, Yang Wu, Lin Shi, Junjie Wang, Zhiming Ding, Yiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. |
ItD: Large Language Models Can Teach Themselves Induction through Deduction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited ability to conduct induction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on two induction benchmarks and shows that it can be used to teach induction through deduction. |
Fine-grained Artificial Neurons in Audio-transformers for Disentangling Neural Auditory Encoding (2023.findings-acl)
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Mengyue Zhou, Xu Liu, David Liu, Zihao Wu, Zhengliang Liu, Lin Zhao, Dajiang Zhu, Lei Guo, Junwei Han, Tianming Liu, Xintao Hu
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat each transformer encoding layer as a single artificial neuron . layer-level embeddings aggregate multiple types of contextual attention captured by multiple head modules . |
| Approach: | They propose to embed each transformer encoding layer as a single artificial neuron . they propose to couple those ANs with their biological-neuron counterparts in the human brain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to link representations to brain activity, the authors say . their results show that the proposed models carry meaningful neurolinguistic information . |
Addressing NER Annotation Noises with Uncertainty-Guided Tree-Structured CRFs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition datasets are notorious for their noisy nature due to annotation errors, inconsistencies, and subjective interpretations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that considers NER as a constituency tree parsing problem and uses a tree-structured Conditional Random Fields with uncertainty evaluation for integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superb performance even in extreme scenarios with 90% annotation noise. |
A Human-Centric Evaluation Platform for Explainable Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.eacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating plausibility, the helpfulness of explanations, is essential for developing eXplainable AI (XAI) that can really aid human users. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-centric evaluation platform to measure plausibility of explanations in the context of eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC) they showcase two use cases to illustrate what results can be achieved with the system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation platform is designed to evaluate plausibility of explanations in eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC) the proposed evaluation system is based on two use cases in an experimental setting to demonstrate the results. |
LLMs and Copyright Risks: Benchmarks and Mitigation Approaches (2025.naacl-tutorial)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, but their widespread use has raised significant copyright concerns. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI and examine specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
| Outcome: | The course will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI, followed by an examination of specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
FineReason: Evaluating and Improving LLMs’ Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving (2025.acl-long)
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Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight an important shift from the “System 1” way of quick reactions to the “system 2” style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-puzzle benchmark for systematic evaluation of large language models' reasoning capabilities that decomposes each puzzle into atomic steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on state checking and state transition tasks and demonstrates gains in reasoning by up to 5.1%. |
ViT-TTS: Visual Text-to-Speech with Scalable Diffusion Transformer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-speech (TTS) performance has improved with the advent of denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models . however, perceived quality of audio depends on content, pitch, rhythm, and energy . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers that complement phoneme sequences with visual information to generate high-perceived audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models regardless of visibility of the scene . it can generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for AR and VR applications . |
Towards Better Chain-of-Thought: A Reflection on Effectiveness and Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recall extra information from the question to enhance CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT and evaluates it based on their information gain. |
PathReasoner: Modeling Reasoning Path with Equivalent Extension for Logical Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing logical reasoning tasks are challenging, especially for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic reasoning task model that transforms each logical sample into reasoning paths and propose an atom extension strategy supported by equivalent logical formulas to form new reasoning paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves competitive performances on two logical reasoning benchmarks and great generalization abilities. |
Web Fraud Attacks Against LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly gaining popularity, and its inherent security risks are rapidly becoming a concern. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack manipulating unique structures of web links to deceive MAS by using homoglyph deception, sub-directory nesting, and parameter obfuscation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks exploit unique structures of web links to deceive MAS . they exhibit significant destructive potential across different MAS architectures . |
RESTful-Llama: Connecting User Queries to RESTful APIs (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in zero-shot learning and reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms natural language instructions into effective RESTful API calls and a method to generate fine-tuning datasets from public API documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in a 31.9% improvement in robustness and 2.33x increase in efficiency compared to existing methods. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Domain-Oriented Prefix-Tuning: Towards Efficient and Generalizable Fine-tuning for Zero-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for domain adaptation of abstractive dialogue summarization lack generalization ability on new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-oriented prefix-tuning model that uses a prefix module to alleviate domain entanglement and discrete prompts to guide the model to focus on key contents of dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be generalized to two multi-domain dialogue summarization datasets. |
Discriminative Reasoning for Document-level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models use graph networks to implicitly model reasoning skills . but it is yet to be seen whether modeling these reasoning skills implicitly is competitive with intuitive reasoning skills between one entity pair in this document. |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminative reasoning framework to explicitly model the paths of reasoning skills between entity pairs in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on the large-scale DocRE dataset. |
Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating daily lives and require real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use time-division-multiplexing to process queries and responses pseudo-simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can listen to users while generating output and adjust to provide instant feedback. |
Conv-Basis: A New Paradigm for Efficient Attention Inference and Gradient Computation in Transformers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a large computational cost for attention computation in large language models is a major obstacle . |
| Approach: | They propose a convolution-like structure for attention computation using convolution matrices . they then propose an efficient approximation method to approximate the attention matrix . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves nearly linear time complexity in n1+o(1) time. |
From Perceptions to Decisions: Wildfire Evacuation Decision Prediction with Behavioral Theory-informed LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing statistical methods for evacuation decision prediction fail to capture complex and diverse behavioral logic of different individuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework that integrates behavioral theories and models to streamline the Chain-of-Thought reasoning and integrates with memory-based Reinforcement Learning module to provide accurate evacuation decision prediction and understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three post-wildfire survey datasets with strong cross-event generalizability over existing models. |
Following Occam’s Razor: Dynamic Combination of Structured Knowledge for Multi-Hop Question Answering using LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering is a challenging task that requires capturing information from multiple positions in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for integrating text-based and triple-based paradigms that incorporates structured knowledge into large-scale question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-hop question answering by incorporating structured knowledge into the models. |
MoDE-CoTD: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Complex Reasoning Tasks with Mixture of Decoupled LoRA-Experts (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current Chain-of-thought Distillation methods hinder CoT reasoning performance . student models are separately distilled from specific reasoning tasks . parameter update of student models severely harms CoT ability on unseen reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which distills Chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models to much smaller student models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the reasoning ability of large language models on 14 datasets. |
UltraEval: A Lightweight Platform for Flexible and Comprehensive Evaluation for LLMs (2024.acl-demos)
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Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Shengding Hu, Ranchi Zhao, Jie Zhou, Hanghao Wu, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation platforms are complex and poorly modularized, hindering seamless incorporation into researcher’s workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight evaluation framework characterized by lightweight, comprehensiveness, modularity, and efficiency that integrates models, data, and metrics into a unified evaluation workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is lightweight, comprehensive, modular, and efficient. |
BWLA: Breaking the Barrier of W1AX Post-Training Quantization for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have driven major progress in NLP, but memory and compute requirements hinder practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that preserves high accuracy while achieving 1-bit weight quantization . the orthogonal-kronecker transformation learns an orthogonale mapping via EM minimization - a new approach to quantization is proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1-bit weight quantization with low activations with low-bit activations. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
CheckRLM: Effective Knowledge–Thought Coherence Checking in Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Dingling Xu, Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Zhichun Wang, Daren Zha, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) have improved performance on complex tasks by extending the reasoning chain, but they are prone to factual errors, especially in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves the reliability of the reasoning process by timely checking and correcting factual errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and shows that it mitigates error accumulation with lower costs. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation (2025.naacl-long)
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Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-party data valuation approach that assesses the value of individual data samples and proposes a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, showing significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase. |
Cross-Lingual Pitfalls: Automatic Probing Cross-Lingual Weakness of Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success in Natural Language Processing, yet their cross-lingual consistency remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify cross-lingual weaknesses in Large Language Models . they construct bilingual question pairs that expose performance discrepancies between English and target languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uncovers over 50% accuracy drops in target languages across models. |
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. |
Revisit Overconfidence for OOD Detection: Reassigned Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Class-dependent Threshold (2022.naacl-main)
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Yanan Wu, Keqing He, Yuanmeng Yan, QiXiang Gao, Zhiyuan Zeng, Fujia Zheng, Lulu Zhao, Huixing Jiang, Wei Wu, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for OOD detection are based on labeled in-domain data . detecting out-of-domain (OOD) or unknown intents is challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning method to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective for both aspects of overconfidence issues. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network for Video Question Answering (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA show our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale progressive attention network to fuse visual and text information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA. |
Understanding Large Language Model Vulnerabilities to Social Bias Attacks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic capabilities across tasks . however, there is a growing concern about their potential to perpetuate social biases . |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs across gender, racial, and religious bias types . they also explore cross-bias and multiple-biases attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are more susceptible to gender bias attacks than racial or religious biases. |
Chameleon: A Language Model Adaptation Toolkit for Automatic Speech Recognition of Conversational Speech (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Language model adaptation (LMA) is a promising solution for conversational speech recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language model adaptation techniques to adapt language models to conversational speech recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares state-of-the-art language model adaptation techniques in conversational speech recognition tasks. |
Fixing Semantic Blind Spots in Anchor Tokens of dMLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models (ARMs) are prone to hallucinations due to their sequential text generation and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free decoding strategy that augments the attention key space with a static, distance-aware matrix to reduce the attention sink effect on semantic anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the attention sink effect on semantic anchors while enhancing their ability to aggregate global visual information. |
Unleashing the Potentials of Likelihood Composition for Multi-modal Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal language models with different architectures, parameter sizes, training datasets, and pipelines exhibit varying strengths across different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell, which they call likelihood composition, and introduce basic operations to compose multiple models’ likelihood distribution when doing a multi-choice visual-question-answering task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell. |
IRT-Router: Effective and Interpretable Multi-LLM Routing via Item Response Theory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks . however, selecting the optimal LLM to respond to a user query often necessitates a delicate balance between performance and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM routing framework that efficiently routes user queries to the most suitable LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in terms of effectiveness and interpretability. |
Progressive Self-Training with Discriminator for Aspect Term Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract aspect terms from review sentences are limited due to lack of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine conventional self-training to progressive self-teaching to reduce noise . they use a discriminator to filter the noisy pseudo-labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four SemEval datasets. |
Rethinking Network Pruning – under the Pre-train and Fine-tune Paradigm (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning results on benchmark transformers, such as BERT, are not as remarkable as those of convolutional neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply a knowledge-aware pruning process to transformer-based pre-trained language models to reduce model size and model weight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning method outperforms the leading competitors with a 20-times weight/FLOPs compression and neglectable loss in prediction accuracy. |
MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yimin Deng, Zhenxi Lin, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Pengyue Jia, Zichuan Fu, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhu, Xian Wu, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on diagnostic reasoning based on internal model knowledge or static knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that integrates multi-perspective evidence to generate a diagnostic prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning traces from web search, SOAP-formatted case, and clinical case database. |
H-MAS: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Scheduling for Multi-Tenant LLM Serving (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuhan Liu, Cong Xu, Qi Jia, Yihua Wang, Feiyu Chen, Liang Jin, Lu Liu, Yaqian Zhao, Yuting Ding, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Multi-tenant Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) workloads exhibit non-stationarity across multiple time scales . existing request schedulers often rely on a fixed policy that remains unchanged at runtime . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-agent scheduler that operates in a layered closed loop . they propose to maintain 1.2–3.0 higher Goodput than SGLang and vLLM . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that H-MAS achieves 1.2–3.0 higher Goodput than SGLang and vLLM . it maintains more stable QoS under diverse request lengths and heterogeneous SLO targets . |
MPVStance: Mitigating Hallucinations in Stance Detection with Multi-Perspective Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in large language models, challenges persist due to hallucination-models generating inaccurate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-perspective verification with Retrieval-Augmented Generation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on the SemEval-2016 and VAST datasets. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
GeoPQA: Bridging the Visual Perception Gap in MLLMs for Geometric Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models, but the impact on multimodal LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that enhances visual perception and fosters reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves geometric reasoning by 9.7% and problem-solving by 9.1% compared to direct reasoning training approach. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods implicitly model time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-based temporal programming method that leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models to understand combinatory time constraints in questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and CronQuestions datasets and is highly efficient on multi-level questions. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
Dual Encoder: Exploiting the Potential of Syntactic and Semantic for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triple Extraction (ASTE) is an advanced natural language processing task. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Encoder: Exploiting the potential of Syntactic and Semantic model which maximizes syntactical and semantic relationships among words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the current state-of-the-art on public benchmarks and shows that it is highly efficient. |
BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness (2026.findings-acl)
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Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
| Challenge: | Currently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the prevailing method for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with function calling capabilities, but its effectiveness is often compromised by two challenges: 1) lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tokens dominate training signals over concise function calls in the learning objective; 2) scarcity of hard training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a self-adjusted signal balancing loss and a hard data re-sampling strategy to selectively generate new, high-quality complex data guided by model errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art models like GPT-5 in function calling performance. |
MavenCoder: Competitive Code Generation via Model Adaptive Planning Strategies and Multi-Perspective Verification Enhancement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced automated program synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-adaptive and verification–enhanced framework for competition-level code generation that leverages adaptive assessment aligned with the model’s capabilities to select planning strategies while providing timely feedback and correction via multi-perspective verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on livecodebench, humanEval+, MBPP+, and codecontests, and achieves pass@1 results exceeding 3%–40%. |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Sensen Gao, Shanshan Zhao, Xu Jiang, Lunhao Duan, Yong Xien Chng, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Jia-Wang Bian, Mingming Gong
| Challenge: | Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. |
Should We Use a Fixed Embedding Size? Customized Dimension Sizes for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to project entities and relations into a low-dimensional space, which is crucial for knowledge completion, fusion, and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed entities and relations into a low-dimensional space to enable knowledge Graphs to be effectively used by downstream AI tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is universal and flexible, suitable for various KGE models. |
FOCUS: Forging Originality through Contrastive Use in Self-Plagiarism for Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate original text using pre-trained language models are problematic as they are trained on corpora constructed by human authors. |
| Approach: | They propose a unique “self-plagiarism” contrastive decoding strategy that modifies prompts in LLMs to develop an amateur model and a professional model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables the development of an amateur model and a professional model while maintaining its standard language model status. |
AesBiasBench: Evaluating Bias and Alignment in Multimodal Language Models for Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models are increasingly used in Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment (PIAA) however, their predictions may reflect subtle biases influenced by demographic factors such as gender, age, and education. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate MLLMs along two complementary dimensions: (1) stereotype bias and (2) alignment between model outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers three subtasks: aesthetic perception, assessment, empathy and alignment between outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
Give the Truth: Incorporate Semantic Slot into Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive dialogue summarization suffers from a lot of factual errors due to scattered salient elements in multi-speaker information interaction process. |
| Approach: | They propose a slot-driven beam search algorithm to give priority to generating salient elements in a limited length by "filling-in-the-blanks". |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves the slot-driven beam search algorithm on different types of factual errors and human evaluation further verifies the results. |
CoAct: Co-Active LLM Preference Learning with Human-AI Synergy (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn from preference-based feedback are expensive and scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines self-rewarding and active learning through human-AI collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three reasoning benchmarks and achieves average improvements of +13.25% on GSM8K, +8.19% on MATH, and +13.16% on WebInstruct. |
Delving into the Openness of CLIP (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set in a zero-shot manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image classification as an image-to-text matching task instead of discrete category IDs to achieve open-vocabulary visual recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize images from an open vocabulary in a zero-shot manner, but its performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level adversarial approaches for textual data have various limitations due to the large search space consisting of combinations of candidate words. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to original texts without perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets compared with state-of-the-art approaches. |
An Efficient Dialogue Policy Agent with Model-Based Causal Reinforcement Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue policy training consider one-step dialogues, leading to inaccurate simulations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dialogue policy learning that trains an agent to select dialogue actions via deep reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three dialogue datasets . it uses model-based reinforcement learning with automatically constructed causal chains . |
A Relaxed Matching Procedure for Unsupervised BLI (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction is even on par with supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a relaxed matching procedure to find a more precise matching between two languages by aligning source and target embedding space bidirectionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms previous unsupervised methods on standard benchmarks. |
Modelling Long-distance Node Relations for KBQA with Global Dynamic Graph (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on deep graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture rich structural information, but they lack the structural information needed for QA. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which captures structural information from KBs and models long-distance node relations from two perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework models long-distance node relations from two perspectives . it is based on two widely used multi-hop KBQA datasets . |
REACT: Representation Extraction And Controllable Tuning to Overcome Overfitting in LLM Knowledge Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haitian Zhong, Yuhuan Liu, Ziyang Xu, Guofan Liu, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Zhe Zhao, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan
| Challenge: | Large language model editing methods suffer from overfitting, where factual updates can propagate beyond their intended scope, overemphasizing the edited target even when it’s contextually inappropriate. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for precise and controllable knowledge editing that utilizes two-phase representations and a linear transformation to compute a directional "belief shift" vector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces overfitting across nearly all evaluation metrics and on COUNTERFACT and MQuAKE. |
MirrorCAPTCHA: Wild CAPTCHA, Wild Distribution, Wild Web-based Platform Meet Multimodal LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Wu, Yuwei Hu, Tianyu Cui, Yueying Tian, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yang Yang, Jianfeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks fail to evaluate an agent's real-world capacity to handle CAPTCHA . Existing benchmarks ignore this practical challenge, failing to evaluate agents' ability to handle complex visual CAPTchas. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark annotated with Weighted Pass Rate and a new metric to measure agent's ability to handle CAPTCHA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms current state-of-the-art closed-source models on mirrorCAPTCHA and achieves 9.4% higher average weighted pass rate and 2.13% higher average Completion degree. |
EngiBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Engineering Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiyuan Zhou, Xinlei Wang, Yirui He, Ruixi Zou, Yang Wu, Yuheng Cheng, Yulu Xie, Wenxuan Liu, Huan Zhao, Yan Xu, Jinjin Gu, Junhua Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-defined or abstract reasoning and fail to capture real-world engineering problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark to evaluate large language models on engineering problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well under well-defined conditions and is based on three levels of difficulty and covers diverse engineering subfields. |
Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Graph Structures and Topic Words (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to summarize textual information are hard to capture long-distance relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a Topic-word Guided Dialogue Graph Attention network to model the dialogue as an interaction graph according to topic word information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two corpus corpus models. |
CoreEval: Automatically Building Contamination-Resilient Datasets with Real-World Knowledge toward Reliable LLM Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Publicly available datasets can be used to evaluate performance of large language models . however, contamination of test data can artificially inflate model performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a Contamination-resilient Evaluation strategy that updates data with real-world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation strategy can be used to update datasets with real-world knowledge. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to problem-solving for large language models fail to provide accurate reasoning and factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide reasoning and retrieval processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on domain-knowledge-intensive tasks . it can be used to iterate retrieval and reasoning, and improve retrieval relevance . |
DFAMS: Dynamic-flow guided Federated Alignment based Multi-prototype Search (2026.acl-long)
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Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Ruiqing Li, Yihang Zhang, Yue Fang, Yongxin Xu, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ambiguous queries struggle to retrieve high-quality documents . DFAMS outperforms advanced FR methods by 14.37% in knowledge classification accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages dynamic information flow to identify latent query intents and construct semantically aligned knowledge partitions for accurate retrieval across heterogeneous sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in classification accuracy and retrieval recall tests. |
Self-Evaluation of Large Language Model based on Glass-box Features (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on external evaluators, focusing on training and prompting strategies, but model-aware glass-box features are overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose to use model-aware glass-box features to evaluate an LLM's output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-aware features are reliable quality indicators for self-evaluation on public benchmarks. |
OpenRubrics: Towards Scalable Synthetic Rubric Generation for Reward Modeling and LLM Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture multifaceted nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a rubric-based reward model that uses a large collection of prompt, rubric pairs to generate a scalar score or preference label for each response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4% across multiple benchmarks. |
FedLEKE: Federated Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing for Multi-Client Collaboration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for updating large language models are inefficient in multi-client scenarios . Existing approaches assume a single-user setting and are ineffective in multiclient scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task that enables multiple clients to perform LEKE while preserving privacy and reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LEKE frameworks on two benchmark datasets and retains 96% of performance. |
MCP-Flow: Facilitating LLM Agents to Master Real-World, Diverse and Scaling MCP Tools (2026.acl-long)
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WenHao Wang, Peizhi Niu, Zhao Xu, Zhaoyu Chen, Jian Du, Yaxin Du, Xianghe Pang, Keduan Huang, Yanfeng Wang, Qiang Yan, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on few servers and lacks training support. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-agent-driven pipeline for large-scale server discovery, data synthesis, and model training that collects and filters data from 1166 servers and 11536 tools. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evidence shows that MCP-Flow generates higher quality instruction-function call pairs and higher agentic task performance than previous work. |
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing models for Abductive Reasoning are limited in their ability to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language task that aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on the proposed dataset. |
Learning a Simple and Effective Model for Multi-turn Response Generation with Auxiliary Tasks (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-turn response generation for open-domain dialogues have a complexity problem . auxiliary tasks that relate to context understanding can guide the learning of the generation model . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn response generation model that has a simple structure yet can effectively leverage conversation contexts for response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in response quality and human judgment . it also enjoys a faster decoding process . |
Towards Noise-Tolerant Speech-Referring Video Object Segmentation: Bridging Speech and Text (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language learning have significantly advanced Human-Computer Interactions (HCI). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to align the semantic spaces between speech and text by incorporating two modules to align semantic spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on AVOS benchmarks. |
SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing character relationships from plain text are time-consuming and low in coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost. |
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. |
SC2: Towards Enhancing Content Preservation and Style Consistency in Long Text Style Transfer (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for short TST are difficult to implement and can cause content degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to vary the style polarity of text while preserving semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over baselines and is highly efficient. |
Incentivizing Parametric Knowledge via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Cross-Cultural Entity Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Jiang Zhou, Xiaohu Zhao, Xinwei Wu, Tianyu Dong, Hao Wang, Yangyang Liu, Heng Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Current systems often fall short of this goal in settings where translation hinges on culturally grounded entities such as books, films, places, songs and idioms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that anchors supervision on a verifiable, entity-level reward signal and incorporates lightweight structural gates to stabilize optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on XC-Translate and shows that it can learn a robust reasoning process rather than imitating reference translations. |
Prediction and Calibration: Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph with Bi-directional Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Network (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs (KGs) organize world knowledge as interlinked triples which describe entities and their relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional Directed Acyclic Graph neural network that splits the reasoning process into prediction and calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous QE models on FB15k, FB16k-237, and NELL995 on prediction and calibration. |
LOG: A Local-to-Global Optimization Approach for Retrieval-based Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering emphasize single-step and multi-step iterative decomposition or retrieval, which are susceptible to failure in long-chain reasoning due to the progressive accumulation of erroneous information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local-tO-Global optimized retrieval method to discover more beneficial information and improve tuplet objective loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models and significantly improves multi-hop reasoning. |
Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Alejandro Hernández-Cano, Alexander Hägele, Allen Hao Huang, Angelika Romanou, Antoni-Joan Solergibert, Barna Pásztor, Bettina Messmer, Dhia Garbaya, Eduard Frank Ďurech, Ido Hakimi, Juan Garcia Giraldo, Mete Ismayilzada, Negar Foroutan, Skander Moalla, Tiancheng Chen, Vinko Sabolčec, Yixuan Xu, Michael Aerni, Badr AlKhamissi, Inés Altemir Marinas, Mohammad Hossein Amani, Matin Ansaripour, Ilia Badanin, Harold Benoit, Emanuela Boros, Nicholas John Browning, Fabian Bösch, Maximilian Böther, Niklas Canova, Camille Challier, Clément Charmillot, Jonathan Coles, Jan Milan Deriu, Arnout Devos, Lukas Drescher, Daniil Dzenhaliou, Maud Ehrmann, Dongyang Fan, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Miguel Gila, María Grandury, Diba Hashemi, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Jiaming Jiang, Mark Klein, Andrei Kucharavy, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Frederike Lübeck, Roman Machacek, Theofilos Ioannis Manitaras, Andreas Marfurt, Kyle Matoba, Simon Matrenok, Henrique Mendonça, Fawzi Roberto Mohamed, Syrielle Montariol, Luca Mouchel, Sven Najem-Meyer, Jingwei Ni, Gennaro Oliva, Matteo Pagliardini, Elia Palme, Andrei Panferov, Léo Paoletti, Marco Passerini, Ivan Pavlov, Auguste Poiroux, Kaustubh Ponkshe, Nathan Ranchin, Javier Rando, Mathieu Sauser, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Mukhammadali Sayfiddinov, Marian Schneider, Stefano Schuppli, Marco Scialanga, Andrei Semenov, Kumar Shridhar, Raghav Singhal, Anna Sotnikova, Alexander Sternfeld, Ayush Kumar Tarun, Paul Teiletche, Jannis Vamvas, Xiaozhe Yao, Hao Zhao, Alexander Ilic, Ana Klimovic, Andreas Krause, Caglar Gulcehre, David Rosenthal, Elliott Ash, Florian Tramèr, Joost VandeVondele, Livio Veraldi, Martin Rajman, Thomas C. Schulthess, Torsten Hoefler, Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi, Imanol Schlag
| Challenge: | Apertus is a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address responsibility shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem, namely data responsibility and global representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to release a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) that address data responsibility and global representation shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is pretrained on openly available data and suppresses verbatim recall of data while retaining task performance. |
Automatic Instruction Evolving for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Evol-Instruct is an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets without human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets without human effort by analyzing and analyzing evolutionary strategies for the given instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms human-designed methods on various benchmarks including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, and HumanEval. |
MRT: Multi-modal Short- and Long-range Temporal Convolutional Network for Time-sync Comment Video Behavior Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Using time-sync comments, it is difficult to understand user behavior due to complexity of interactions between users, videos, and comments. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel time-sync comment behavior prediction model that takes historical behavior into account and optimizes it on the basis of user preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of time-sync comments on visual frames and textual comments on two cats playing simultaneously. |
SARA: Unlocking Multilingual Knowledge in Mixture-of-Experts via Semantically Anchored Routing Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Dong, Yangyang Liu, Jiang Zhou, Xinwei Wu, Xiaohu Zhao, Hao Wang, Heng Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Shaolin Zhu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Low-resource language tokens are often routed to different experts than those activated by high-resourced inputs, which hinders their efficacy in multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer specialized capabilities from high-resource languages as anchors to low-resourced languages by using a symmetric Jensen-Shannon constraint. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard instruction tuning on 5 low-resource languages and 3 benchmarks. |
HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Ru Peng, Tianyu Zhao, Xijun Gu, Zhiting Fan, Haokai Xu, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Yihong Zhuang, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. |
| Approach: | They define the first HSS domain system covering 14 mainstream fields and introduce HSS-Synth. |
| Outcome: | the proposed pipeline outperforms 14 leading baselines on 16 benchmarks. |
Relaxing the Constraints: A Dual-Importance Projection Mechanism for Lifelong Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghai Chen, Senbin Xu, Jiaxi Tan, Xinhua Wu, Yan Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Ke Li, Sicheng Zhao, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on strict orthogonal projection to preserve previously edited knowledge, but this constraint limits gradient expressiveness, resulting in degradation of model generalization and overall performance as the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify critical gradient subspaces and introduces a dual mechanism comprising "accumulated importance" and "projection importance" |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mainstream LLMs show that the proposed method achieves an average comprehensive performance improvement of 10.36% and effectively maintains the model’s general capabilities on downstream tasks. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
MultiAgentESC: A LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Emotional Support Conversation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on generating responses directly and neglect integration of domain-specific reasoning and expert interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free multi-agent collaboration framework for ESC to emulate human-like process of providing emotional support through dialogue analysis, strategy deliberation, and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at providing emotional support and diversifying support strategy selection. |
Can LLMs Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on AI Research Papers (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a variety of scientific tasks, such as answering questions about scientific papers, writing scientific papers and retrieving related works. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of limitation types in scientific research with a focus on AI to evaluate their ability to support early-stage feedback and complement human peer review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enhances the ability of LLM systems to generate limitations in research papers, enabling them to provide more concrete and constructive feedback. |
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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Weijie Shi, Hao Chen, Jiaming Li, Yao Zhao, Yazhong Zhang, Qijin Chen, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks. |
Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal pre-training, cross-modal retrieval remains challenging . lack of relation consistency impairs contextualized representation of image-text pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin. |
Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies of stance detection focus on learning stance information about specific targets from context, but in real-world scenarios, we usually have a certain understanding of a target when we express our stance on it. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the background knowledge of the target into account for better stance detection by categorizing it into episodic and discourse knowledge categories and a heuristic retrieval algorithm based on the topic to retrieve the Wikipedia documents relevant to the sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets showing that the proposed framework is able to detect stances in-target and zero-shot scenarios. |
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. |
QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Linyong Nan, Boyu Mi, Yixin Liu, Weijin Zou, Simeng Han, Ruizhe Chen, Xiangru Tang, Yumo Xu, Dragomir Radev, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-focused task where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored table summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing baselines on table-to-text generation and large language models by concatenating generated facts to the model input. |
Open-Theatre: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for creating, modifying, and experimenting with interactive dramas are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for creating configurable LLM-based interactive drama. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit enhances narrative coherence and realistic behavior in interactions with agents. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Metagent-P: A Neuro-Symbolic Planning Agent with Metacognition for Open Worlds (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Yuntao Liu, Xiaodong Li, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Jinlong Tian, Zhenyu Li, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promising potential through their world knowledge and language processing capabilities in open-world planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the world knowledge of large language models, symbolic reasoning capabilities of cognitive architectures, and metacognition to improve experience utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in Minecraft and reduces the average replanning counts by 34% and exceeds the human success rate by 18.96%. |
Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving (2024.emnlp-main)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Liang Zhao, Yuchun Fan, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Teaching large language models to generate text with citations to evidence sources requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of large language models (LLMs) by attributing output to verifiable sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets show that START improves in aggregating information across multiple sources. |
TEXTOIR: An Integrated and Visualized Platform for Text Open Intent Recognition (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . currently, many dialogue systems are limited to handle the uncertain open intents . |
| Approach: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . it is composed of two main modules: open intent detection and open intent discovery . authors propose a framework to implement a complete process to identify known intents and discover open intents . |
| Outcome: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated and visualized platform for text open intent recognition . it integrates state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmark intent datasets . however, there are still some issues, which bring difficulties for future research . |
Transfer Knowledge from Natural Language to Electrocardiography: Can We Detect Cardiovascular Disease Through Language Models? (2023.findings-eacl)
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Jielin Qiu, William Han, Jiacheng Zhu, Mengdi Xu, Michael Rosenberg, Emerson Liu, Douglas Weber, Ding Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown powerful ability in various downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and automatic ECG diagnosis report generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates high-quality cardiac diagnosis reports and achieves competitive zero-shot classification performance even compared with supervised baselines. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
𝜙-Decoding: Adaptive Foresight Sampling for Balanced Inference-Time Exploration and Exploitation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference-time optimization strategies address the shortsightedness of auto-regressive generation, but the vast search space leads to excessive exploration and insufficient exploitation. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that approximates two distributions via foresight and clustering to provide an efficient estimation of step value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding strategy outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency. |
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles. |
Enhancing One-Shot Pruned Pre-trained Language Models through Sparse-Dense-Sparse Mechanism (2025.coling-main)
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Guanchen Li, Xiandong Zhao, Lian Liu, Zeping Li, Yixing Xu, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Jie He, Ashish Sirasao, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are robust in contextual understanding but their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to prune PLMs . they prune less critical connections using conventional pruning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms SparseGPT and Wanda under identical sparsity. |
Task Compass: Scaling Multi-task Pre-training with Task Prefix (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuosheng Zhang, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Yang Liu, Hai Zhao, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task prefix guided multi-task pre-training framework to explore the relationships among tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as a foundation backbone for a wide range of tasks and as augmentation tool for data augmentation with complementary tasks. |
Improving Event Representation via Simultaneous Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning and Clustering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work exploits easily accessible co-occurrence information of events to learn event representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised contrastive learning method and a prototype-based clustering method for event representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Hard Similarity and Transitive Sentence Similarity tasks. |
ProphetChat: Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Simulation of Future Conversation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | generative dialogue models use dialogue histories to generate the response . however, generating a response based on the historical information is not easy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes simulated dialogue futures to enhance response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate better responses over strong baselines on two open-domain dialogue datasets. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Geneverse: A Collection of Open-source Multimodal Large Language Models for Genomic and Proteomic Research (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising tool for biomedical and healthcare research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use finetuned LLMs and multimodal LLM for genomic and proteomics tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform closed-source models in genomic and proteomics tasks and are highly accurate. |
Inside Out: Evolving User-Centric Core Memory Trees for Long-Term Personalized Dialogue Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue systems struggle to reconcile unbounded interactions with finite context constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes a globally maintained PersonaTree as the carrier of long-term user profiling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing systems in suppressing contextual noise and persona inconsistency. |
Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification with Horizontal and Vertical Category Correlations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hierarchical multi-label text classification ignore vertical category correlations or exploit dependencies across levels without considering horizontal correlations . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-label text classification framework that considers both vertical and horizontal category correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on real-world HMTC datasets with significant improvements over baselines. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
Can Brain Signals Reveal Inner Alignment with Human Languages? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Brain Signals, such as Electroencephalography, and human languages have been explored independently for many downstream tasks, however, the connection between them has not been well explored. |
| Approach: | They introduce a multimodal transformer alignment model to observe coordinated representations between EEG and language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieved an F1-score improvement of 1.7% on ZuCo and 9.3% on Zuco datasets for sentiment analysis, and 7.4% on ZuCO for relation detection. |
Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slot filling only learn surface mapping of slot types between D S and D T and get poor generalization capability or robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative zero-shot prompt learning framework for cross-domain slot filling which improves generalization and robustness than previous work. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and robustness on unseen slots and an efficient prompt tuning strategy boosts performance. |
Semi-Supervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Two-way Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semisupervised methods do not fully utilize the knowledge hidden in annotated and nonannotated data, which hinders further improvement of their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised BLI framework to encourage interaction between supervised signal and unsupervised alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can incorporate any supervised and unsupervised BLI methods based on optimal transport and bi-directional lexicon update. |
Multi-perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Xian Wu, Zhihong Zhu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a widely used method to tackle incompleteness in knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework to compensate for the deficiency of contextualized knowledge by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves knowledge graph completion (KGC) by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
Boosting LLM Translation Skills without General Ability Loss via Rationale Distillation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them for Machine Translation (MT) often introduces catastrophic forgetting, compromising the broad general abilities of LLMs and introducing potential security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that harnesses the strong generative capabilities of Large Language Models to create rationales for training data, which are then "replayed" to prevent forgetting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach harnesses the strong generative capabilities of LLMs to create rationales for training data, which are then “replayed” to prevent forgetting. |
SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) ignore potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfers simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module to align the PET learning and selection modules to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two CL benchmarks show that the proposed framework is superior when scaled to different model sizes, different model architectures and unseen tasks. |
Search-in-Context: Efficient Multi-Hop QA over Long Contexts via Monte Carlo Tree Search with Dynamic KV Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multihop question answering (MHQA) over long contexts are often neglecting explicit reasoning or incurring expensive computational costs due to full-attention mechanisms over long contextuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with dynamic key-value retrieval to enable iterative, context-aware reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with dynamic key-value (KV) retrieval to enable iterative, context-aware reasoning. |
Leros: Learning Explicit Reasoning on Synthesized Data for Commonsense Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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Chenhao Wang, Pengfei Cao, Jiachun Li, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Li Qiuxia, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent work shows large language models can generate useful rationales for commonsense question answering (CQA) however, the cost of deployment and further tuning is relatively expensive for the large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both knowledge graphs and large language models to synthesize rationale-augmented CQA data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate useful rationales on unseen CQA benchmarks. |
Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on explanation stability under real user noise are limited . decoder LLMs produce significantly more stable explanations than encoder baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box robustness evaluation framework for token-level explanations based on leave-one-out occlusion . they propose to operationalize explanation robustness with top-token flip rate under realistic perturbations at multiple severity levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is compared with baseline models and encoder and decoder families. |
AdapThink: Adaptive Thinking Preferences for Reasoning Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has highlighted a significant inefficiency associated with the slow thinking paradigm . models often overthink simple tasks while underthinking complex challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adaptive reasoning preference control that dynamically adjusts reflection preferences based on group-level distributional statistics of reasoning length and reflection intensity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces average response length by 17.1%-21.4% while improving performance by 6.12-6.59 points under 32K token budgets. |
Memory-augmented Query Reconstruction for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that confuse tool utilization with knowledge reasoning harm readability and give rise to tool invocation hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple LLM from tool invocation tasks by establishing a memory module with explicit descriptions of query statements and a query memory module to facilitate the KGQA process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on WebQSP and CWQ benchmarks. |
Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration (2025.naacl-long)
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Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao, Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Hui Wang, Xi Zeng, Xingwei Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |
RLShield: Dynamic Jailbreak Detection for LLMs via Reinforced Adaptive Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect jailbreak prompts rely on static model components or fixed decision thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic jailbreak detection framework that employs reinforcement learning for adaptive threshold selection. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the framework outperforms baselines in detection performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. |