Papers by Yang Fan
DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, they struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed and achieves 7.5% improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel. |
Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Energy-Based Gibbs Alignment (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer parallel decoding and bidirectional context modeling . aligning dLLms with reinforcement learning (RL) remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a variational framework that reformulates RL for dLLMs as a distribution matching problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reformulates RL for dLLMs as a distribution matching problem. |
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues, neglecting the nuanced nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that human feedback can significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness in real-world usage scenarios. |
Unified Contextual Query Rewriting (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Mukund Rungta, Yang Liu, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Vishal Vasudevan, Kellen Gillespie, Zeynab Raeesy
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications to assist users in daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified contextual query rewriting model that unifies QR for friction reduction and contextual carryover . they leverage the text-to-text unified framework which uses independent tasks with weighted loss to account for task importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces friction and contextual carryover by using multiple auxiliary tasks. |
WW-CSL: A New Dataset for Word-Based Wearable Chinese Sign Language Detection (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sign language is an effective non-verbal communication mode for the hearingimpaired people. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-form scheme to represent dynamic CSL gestures using a word-based dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the local sequential sensor data derived from the wearable-based CSL gestures with the global, fine-grained skeleton representations captured from video-based gestures simultaneously. |
PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming more popular and are gaining widespread use in artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that addresses both privacy preservation and model compression in federated settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains competitive performance comparable to full-sized LLMs while ensuring robust privacy protection through its federated architecture. |
Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons: Retraining-Free Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures require loading all expert parameters . previous work focused on expert pruning and merging but focused on neuron-level structure . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic framework for expert pruning and reconstruction . it prunes redundant experts using router statistics, then decomposes them into neuron-level expert segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of experts and memory usage, making it easier to deploy. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guhong Chen, Liyang Fan, Zihan Gong, Nan Xie, Zixuan Li, Ziqiang Liu, Chengming Li, Qiang Qu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing legal language models struggle with dynamic courtroom interactions, resulting in overfitting to standardized legal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new adversarial evolutionary approach for agents that performs dynamic knowledge learning and evolution through structured adversarials in a simulated courtroom program. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLM-based models in three critical dimensions: cognitive agility, professional knowledge, and logical rigor. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
Interpreting Twitter User Geolocation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying user geolocation suffer from a lack of interpretability on the corresponding results. |
| Approach: | They adopt influence functions to interpret the behavior of GNN-based models by identifying the importance of training users when predicting locations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method provides meaningful explanations on prediction results and also uncovers the so-called "black-box" GNN-based models by investigating the effect of individual nodes. |
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Multipanel images are a common form of visual representations, and humans can achieve approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that tests multipanel visual reasoning models with 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that challenge state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) human users can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions, compared with previous benchmarks. |
On Fake News Detection with LLM Enhanced Semantics Mining (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting fake news use only news embeddings to capture the lexical semantics between tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-based model with prompts to extract news embeddings from LLMs and a generalized page-rank model to extract local and global semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows superior performance on five benchmark datasets over seven baseline methods. |
Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations, but this can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a model with thousands of model evaluations to estimate Shapley Values without additional model evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods and does not suffer from stability issues as inference is deterministic. |
iMOVE : Instance-Motion-Aware Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaze Li, Yaya Shi, Zongyang Ma, Haoran Xu, Yandong.bai Yandong.bai, Huihui Xiao, Ruiwen Kang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models have led to rapid development, significantly enhancing the capture of overall video semantics and achieving remarkable performance in general video understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instance-motion-aware video instruction-tuning dataset iMOVE that utilizes Event-awful Spatiotemporal Efficient Modeling to retain informative instance spatiotemporal motion details while maintaining computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in video temporal understanding and general video understanding. |
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin, Penghao Ouyang, Gaotang Li, Ze Yang, Hui Liu, Sumit Keswani, Vishwa Pardeshi, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
Breach in the Shield: Unveiling the Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models and Vision Language Model (LLMs) have impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, yet remain vulnerable to external and internal perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a stability measure called FI, First order local Influence, which quantifies the sensitivity of individual parameters and input dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed stability measure measures the sensitivity of parameters and input dimensions across LLMs and VLMs. |
Transition-based Directed Graph Construction for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract emotions and causes from unannotated text are pipelined, causing error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform a task into a procedure of parsing-like directed graph construction . they propose to generate a directed graph with labeled edges based on a sequence of actions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 6.71% (p0.01) in F1 measure. |
Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly-supervised Paraphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate paraphrases with weak supervision are limited in real-world scenarios due to the lack of coherent and controllable generated paraphrase. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate high-quality paraphrases with weak supervision . they obtain abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts. |
Leveraging Prefix Transfer for Multi-Intent Text Revision (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Ruining Chong, Cunliang Kong, Liu Wu, Zhenghao Liu, Ziye Jin, Liner Yang, Yange Fan, Hanghang Fan, Erhong Yang
| Challenge: | Text revision is a necessary process to improve text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-intent text revision system that can revise texts without explicit intent annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on the IteraTeR dataset and significantly improves the SARI score with more than 3% improvement. |
FedCoT: Federated Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative force in artificial intelligence, demonstrating exceptional proficiency across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated framework for the Chain-of-Thought distillation of knowledge from LLMs to SLMs, while adhering to privacy requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures secure knowledge transfer from an LLM on a high-powered server to an SLM on resource-constrained client while adhering to privacy requirements. |
Large Language Models Can Solve Real-World Planning Rigorously with Formal Verification Tools (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generate correct plans for multi-constraint planning problems . a recent study showed that large language models have significant potential in solving planning problems. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based planning framework that formalizes and solves multi-constraint planning problems as constrained satisfiability problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a success rate of 93.9% and is effective with diverse paraphrased prompts. |
WESR: A Benchmark and Strong Baseline for Word-level Event-Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chenchen Yang, Kexin Huang, Liwei Fan, Qian Tu, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Linqi Yin, Shimin Li, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | aaron carroll: the precise localization of non-verbal vocal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. carroll says current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage. carrol: knowing exactly where an event occurred is not enough; knowing exactly what it happened is. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of 21 vocal events with a new categorization into discrete versus continuous types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles ASR errors from event detection while maintaining ASR quality. |
One Refiner to Unlock Them All: Inference-Time Reasoning Elicitation via Reinforcement Query Refinement (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and lack the flexibility to fully activate their latent reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that treats reasoning elicitation as an inference-time alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 2.1% on average across diverse architectures and benchmarks. |
DecBERT: Enhancing the Language Understanding of BERT with Causal Attention Masks (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Transformer Encoder model can't automatically capture word order, so explicit position embeddings are required to be fed into the target model. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based language model DecBERT that uses a causal attention mask to capture word order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE language understanding benchmark and accelerates the pre-training process. |
Towards Zero-shot Learning for End-to-end Cross-modal Translation Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end zero-shot speech translation model is based on a zero-shot approach, but it is less competitive because of the limited amount of data available for multiple modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end zero-shot speech translation model that connects two pre-trained uni-modality modules via word rotator’s distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than or as well as those of the CTC-based models and can be trained in an end-to-end style to avoid error propagation. |
MentalGLM Series: Explainable Large Language Models for Mental Health Analysis on Chinese Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wei Zhai, Nan Bai, Qing Zhao, Jianqiang Li, Fan Wang, Hongzhi Qi, Meng Jiang, Xiaoqin Wang, Bing Xiang Yang, Guanghui Fu
| Challenge: | Social media is a key platform for emotional expression, yet deep learning lacks flexibility and interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese social media to train interpretable mental health instruction datasets to test models' ability to explain their decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform deep learning and LLMs on three mental health downstream tasks and demonstrate their potential for clinical applications. |
SPIDE: Serial and Parallel Intertwined Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenru Xu, Peixuan Xu, Ziqi Yang, Ming Hu, Zihui Wang, Jianzhong Qi, Rongshan Yu, Xiaoliang Fan, Cheng Wang
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a training-free SD framework that orchestrates dynamic alternation combining serial dynamic drafting with parallel draft verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a serial and parallel intertwined speculative DEcoding framework that orchestrates dynamic alternation combining serial dynamic drafting and parallel draft verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates inference while reducing the LLM usage costs. |
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuaimin Li, Liyang Fan, Zeyang li, Zhuoyue Wan, Yufang Lin, Shiwen Ni, Feiteng Fang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Yuanfeng Song, Kun Jing, Chen Jason Zhang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines. |
CoRe-MMRAG: Cross-Source Knowledge Reconciliation for Multimodal RAG (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models have significantly improved reasoning and generation tasks by leveraging joint vision-language representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconciles inconsistencies across knowledge sources . they use a four-stage pipeline to generate an internal response from parametric knowledge . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on KB-VQA show that CoRe-MMRAG achieves performance gains of 5.6% and 9.3% over baseline methods. |
Fewer is More: Boosting Math Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, yet they struggle with math reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine pruner that prunes unimportant tokens to fit the context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms prompting baselines across various LLMs and 5 math datasets and achieves 4.55% absolute improvements without any fine-tuning. |
Where to Attack: A Dynamic Locator Model for Backdoor Attack in Text Classifications (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | BackDoor Attack (BDA) study aims to train a poisoned model with clean data and some trigger-embedded instances to perform normally on normal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a poisoned model with clean and poisonest inputs . they propose to use triggers to predict those poisonets as target labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict P2P dynamically without human intervention. |
Compressing then Matching: An Efficient Pre-training Paradigm for Multimodal Embedding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Da Li, Yuxiao Luo, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Yuan, Biao Yang, Yan Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a compressed pre-training phase which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
DESED: Dialogue-based Explanation for Sentence-level Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yinyi Wei, Shuaipeng Liu, Jianwei Lv, Xiangyu Xi, Hailei Yan, Wei Ye, Tong Mo, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence-level event detection depend on manual annotations or domain expertise to design sophisticated templates and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based explanation paradigm to enhance sentence semantics for event detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to two event detection datasets. |
Interpretable Operational Risk Classification with Semi-Supervised Variational Autoencoder (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text classification frameworks for operational risk prediction lack interpretability and labeled data are often misaligned. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised text classification framework that integrates multi-head attention mechanism with Semi-supervised variational inference for operational risk classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on a real-world dataset and can use unlabeled data to learn visually interpretable representations. |
Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that take into account the binary tree structure of mathematical expressions have achieved better performance, but the output space is non-deterministic. |
| Approach: | They propose a Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver which applies a tree with any M branches to unify the output structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art models under similar experimental conditions and performs much better under low-resource conditions. |
MulDimIF: A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Caishuang Huang, Zhuohan Chen, Wenjie Fu, Chenyuan Yang, Leyi Yang, Yilong Wu, Peng Wang, Meng Zhou, Xiaolong Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on constraint categories, offering little guidance for improving instruction following abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework that allows for instruction following . they construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples and evaluate 18 LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following performance without compromising general performance. |
FaithLM: Towards Faithful Explanations for Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yu-Neng Chuang, Guanchu Wang, Chia-Yuan Chang, Ruixiang Tang, Shaochen Zhong, Fan Yang, Andrew Wen, Mengnan Du, Xuanting Cai, Vladimir Braverman, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce natural language explanations, but they lack faithfulness and do not reflect the evidence the model uses to decide. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework that evaluates and improves the faithfulness of LLM explanations without token masking or task-specific heuristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves faithfulness of large language models without masking or heuristics. |
PEToolLLM: Towards Personalized Tool Learning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tool learning studies focus on general-purpose tool-use capability, but ignore the importance of personalized tool-user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to adapt Large Language Models to personalized tool learning task, which is trained through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on PEToolBench show that the proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in the personalized tool learning task. |
Towards IP Intelligence: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Intellectual Property Knowledge and Practice (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang, Huaren Liu, Minghui Zhu, Zhifei Qin, Li Linwei, Yilin Yue, Shiqiang Wang, Jiayan Li, Wu Yihang, Ziqiang Liu, Longze Chen, Run Luo, Liyang Fan, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Kan Xu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Chengming Li, Shiwen Ni, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets and benchmarks focus only on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating room for improvement . open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models . |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
Self-Awareness before Action: Mitigating Logical Inertia via Proactive Cognitive Awareness (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on abductive and long-context reasoning reports that current models still lack self-awareness of missing premises. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning framework that introduces self-awareness of missing premises before making the final decision. |
| Outcome: | SABA achieves best performance on all three difficulty splits of detective puzzle benchmark . a small early mistake can remain uncorrected and can guide later reasoning . |
An Empirical Study on Multiple Information Sources for Zero-Shot Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Auxiliary information from multiple sources has been demonstrated to be effective in zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) however, there is no comprehensive understanding of how to make better use of the existing information sources and how they affect the performance of ZFET. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source fusion model targeting auxiliary information from multiple sources to improve zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 11.42% and 22.84% gains over state-of-the-art baselines on BBN and Wiki respectively with regard to macro F1 scores. |
Beyond Surface-Level Patterns: An Essence-Driven Defense Framework Against Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on surface-level patterns, overlooking the deeper attack essences. |
| Approach: | They propose an Essence-Driven Defense Framework Against Jailbreak Attacks in Aligned Large Language Models that extracts the "attack essence" from a diverse set of known attack instances and stores it in an offline vector database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by reducing the Attack Success Rate by at least 20%, underscoring its superior robustness against jailbreak attacks. |
Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Deyuan Liu, Zhanyue Qin, Hairu Wang, Zhao Yang, Zecheng Wang, Fangying Rong, Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Bo Li, Xi Chen, Cunhang Fan, Zhao Lv, Dianhui Chu, Zhiying Tu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
Can Small Language Models Help Large Language Models Reason Better?: LM-Guided Chain-of-Thought (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for guiding a language model in reasoning tasks are limited by their tendency to generate low-quality rationales that are repetitive and vacuous. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a lightweight language model for guiding a black-box large LM in reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in answer prediction accuracy. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
Exploiting Contextual Knowledge in LLMs through 𝒱-usable Information based Layer Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance the context-faithfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs) ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs’ internal representations by employing V-usable information analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves context-faithfulness generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge. |
CGF: Constrained Generation Framework for Query Rewriting in Conversational AI (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Hao, Yang Liu, Xing Fan, Saurabh Gupta, Saleh Soltan, Rakesh Chada, Pradeep Natarajan, Chenlei Guo, Gokhan Tur
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant help millions of users to perform a lot of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Constrained Generation Framework for query rewriting at global and personalized levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the query rewriting performance. |
A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Natural Question Generation using Bi-discriminators (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on visual question generation is focused on training models to fit the annotated data set that makes them indifferent from other language generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two discriminators to enhance the training of a visual question generator to ask natural questions about an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of automatic and human evaluation metrics. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting During Domain Adaptation of Seq2seq Language Generation (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on lifelong learning requires incremental memory space to learn a model . existing work on experience replay or elastic weighted consolidation requires incremental space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a recall optimization mechanism to memorize parameters of previous tasks via regularization and a domain drift estimation algorithm to compensate the drift between different domains in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on paraphrase and dialog response generation tasks. |
Cogito: A Cognitive Agentic Framework Driven by Dynamic Graph of Thoughts for Financial Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to financial report generation are insufficient to handle dynamic uncertainties of real-world financial environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitively grounded agentic framework for professional financial report generation that is driven by Dynamic Graph of Thoughts and a social collaboration mechanism to facilitate coordinated agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a dynamic reasoning model and social collaboration mechanism. |
Logic-guided Semantic Representation Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to zero-shot relation classification can only identify seen relations . existing methods rely on descriptive information to improve understandability of relation types . |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-guided semantic representation learning model for zero-shot relation classification that builds connections between seen and unseen relations via implicit and explicit semantic representations with knowledge graph embeddings and logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen relation types and achieve promising improvements. |
The Medium Is Not the Message: Deconfounding Document Embeddings via Linear Concept Erasure (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Embedding-based similarity metrics can be influenced by content dimensions and spurious attributes like the text’s source or language. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing algorithm that removes observed confounders from encoder representations and removes them from the encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on out-of-distribution benchmarks and on benchmarks, but performance is not affected. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks can cause LLMs to make wrong predictions on downstream tasks or generate harmful content misaligned with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use randomized smoothing to add noise to the input and then make predictions based on these denoised versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial perturbations for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). |
Pre3: Enabling Deterministic Pushdown Automata for Faster Structured LLM Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junyi Chen, Shihao Bai, Zaijun Wang, Siyu Wu, Chuheng Du, Hailong Yang, Ruihao Gong, Shengzhong Liu, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for structured generation of outputs are inefficient under large inference batches. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based method that parses LR(1) grammars into a pushdown automaton and exploits deterministic pushdown automation to optimize the constrained LLM decoding efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves time per output token (TPOT) by 40% and throughput by 36% . |
Domain-Lifelong Learning for Dialogue State Tracking via Knowledge Preservation Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingbin Liu, Pengfei Cao, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Xunliang Cai, Fan Yang, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing offline DST models require a fixed dataset to train . Existing domain-lifelong learning methods are impractical in real-world applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-lifelong learning method to continuously train a DST model on new data to learn incessantly emerging new domains while avoiding catastrophically forgetting old learned domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods by 4.25% and 8.27% on the MultiWOZ and the SGD benchmarks. |
RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yancheng Wang, Ziyan Jiang, Zheng Chen, Fan Yang, Yingxue Zhou, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingzhen Yang
| Challenge: | Existing recommendations systems are limited in generalizing to new tasks due to model scale and data size constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered autonomous recommender agent, RecMind, which is capable of leveraging external knowledge to provide zero-shot personalized recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing zero/few-shot LLM-based recommendation baseline methods in various tasks and achieves comparable performance to a fully trained recommendation model P5. |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal content detection fail to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies and ignore inherent noise in multimodal features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal rumor detection method based on a frequency domain spectral selection method and entropy-guided uncertainty fusion method to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection . it shows stronger detection capability and robustness on multiple datasets . |
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection. |
Attending Sentences to detect Satirical Fake News (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to capture news satire do not explore sentence and document difference . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical deep neural network approach for satire detection . it is able to capture satirical news both at the sentence level and document level . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can capture satire at sentence and document levels. |
Nash-Pruned CredMAS: Dynamic Panel Pruning for VLM-MAS using Nash-based Selection and Doubly-Robust Credits (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are expensive due to static panel designs, where all N agents communicate at every T round. |
| Approach: | They propose an economic framework that transforms agent selection into a dynamic resource allocation game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces token consumption by over 25% on challenging benchmarks while reducing token consumption. |
PRompt Optimization in Multi-Step Tasks (PROMST): Integrating Human Feedback and Heuristic-based Sampling (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize prompts for LLM-driven multi-step tasks using a human-designed feedback rule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods on 11 representative multi-step tasks. |
Causal-Debias: Unifying Debiasing in Pretrained Language Models and Fine-tuning via Causal Invariant Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove unwanted stereotypical associations from pretrained language models (PLMs) are often focused on removing unwanted stereotypes from PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to remove unwanted stereotypical associations in pretrained language models . they propose bias-relevant factors are causal, while labelrelevant factors causal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces stereotypical associations after PLMs are fine-tuned . the proposed framework mitigates bias from a causal invariant perspective . |
Chase: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Dataset for Cross-Database Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | XDTS is a cross-database context-dependent text-to-sql problem with wide range of applications. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for cross-database context-dependent Text-to-SQL . they find that only 35% of questions are context-independent and 28% of SQL queries are easy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an exact match accuracy of 40% over all questions and 16% over all question sequences. |
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhao Xinjie, Fan Gao, Xingyu Song, Yingjian Chen, Rui Yang, Yanran Fu, Yuyang Wang, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering (QA) is a central challenge in natural language processing . early mistakes can cause errors and undermine the final result, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible multi-agent reasoning framework that backtracks to earlier valid states when conflicts arise. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the framework improves on forward-only benchmarks by 6% . the approach enables agents to backtrack to valid states when conflicts arise . |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
FedMKT: Federated Mutual Knowledge Transfer for Large and Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research in large language models (LLMs) has focused on enabling clients to fine-tune their locally deployed homogeneous LLMs collaboratively or on transferring knowledge from server-based LLM to small language models at downstream clients. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient federated mutual knowledge transfer framework for large and small language models that allows for token alignment and selective knowledge transfer between client-side LLMs and a server-side SLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the performance of both LLMs and SLMs with clients' unique domain insights while preserving the server's LLM and client's unique domain insight. |
AutoSUIT Bench - Automated Security UnIt Test Benchmark for LLM Coding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Samuel Osebe, Fan Yang, Junyi Li, Yue Gu, Yongxin Wang, Satyapriya Krishna, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta, Weitong Ruan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the vulnerability code benchmark creation with iterative auto validation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 232 CWE categories across C/C++, Java, and Python languages. |
Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems. |
HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | relying on large language models for information has raised concerns about reliability and accuracy of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories for various NLG tasks and propose HAllucination Detection models which integrate hallucinism detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Explain the Synth: Interpretable Evaluation of LLM Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a rule-based model as a shared explanatory language to examine the explanation of real versus synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares the explanatory structure induced by real versus synthetic data. |
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Zhang, ChengLIn Zhu, Yanjun Shen, Wenjing Luo, Yan Zhang, Hao Liang, Tao Zhang, Fan Yang, Mingan Lin, Yujing Qiao, Weipeng Chen, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. |
FedProxy: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Proxy SLMs and Heterogeneity-Aware Fusion (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a performance bottleneck . Existing approaches like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM) they propose 'resource-friendly' compression and 'robust optimization' to handle data heterogeneity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FedProxy outperforms OT and centralized fine-tuning methods. |
InfiMM-WebMath-40B: Advancing Multimodal Pre-Training for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaotian Han, Yiren Jian, Xuefeng Hu, Haogeng Liu, Yiqi Wang, Qihang Fan, Yuang Ai, Huaibo Huang, Ran He, Zhenheng Yang, Quanzeng You
| Challenge: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it consists of 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
| Approach: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a high-quality dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it contains 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
| Outcome: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a high-quality dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it consists of 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
GrandGuard: Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Safeguards for Elderly-Chatbot Interaction Safety (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changxuan Fan, Xi Yang, Yueyuan Zheng, Bin Zhou, Yuanping Wang, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Ki Sen Hung, Dazhao Du, Haoran Li, Janet Hui-wen Hsiao, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a survey of older adults shows that many LLMs mishandle elderly-specific contextual risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . they use a taxonomy to identify 50 fine-grained risk types across mental well-being, financial, medical, toxicity, and privacy domains . |
| Outcome: | a new framework assesses elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . it achieves 96.2% and 90.9% unsafe-prompt detection accuracy, respectively . |
TL-Training: A Task-Feature-Based Framework for Training Large Language Models in Tool Use (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Yuming Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhengyin Du
| Challenge: | a new approach to training large language models (LLMs) overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data . they use a dataset to train large-scale LLMs and a reward mechanism tailored to error categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. |
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Giving Control Back to Models: Enabling Offensive Language Detection Models to Autonomously Identify and Mitigate Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models often rely on specific words to predict offensive content, compromising model fairness and potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework to help models identify and mitigate biases by integrating multiple natural language processing techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rate of models in in-distribution and out-of-difference tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements on larger datasets. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
Enhancing Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Lorentz Transformations (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph embedding rely on tangent approximation and are not fully hyperbolic. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic KGE method that represents entities as points in the Lorentz model and represents relations as the intrinsic transformation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures various types of relations including hierarchical structures. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
On the Intractability to Synthesize Factual Inconsistencies in Summarization (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting factual inconsistencies in abstractive summarization are lacking in factual consistency detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to use real model-generated summaries with human annotations to detect factual inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the SOTA on CoGenSumm, FactCC, Frank, and SummEval datasets. |
Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents . they propose BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard prompts in rule extraction and execution. |
MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to classify unstructured texts into specific types have been limited in practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese text conversations and phone conversations to expand event detection to the scenarios involving informal and heterogeneous texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is based on user reviews, text conversations, and phone conversations in a leading e-commerce platform for food service. |
CCG: Rare-Label Prediction via Neural SEM–Driven Causal Game (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-label classification (MLC) faces persistent challenges from label imbalance, spurious correlations, distribution shifts, especially in rare label prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Causal Cooperative Game framework that models multi-player cooperative process for multi-label classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves rare label prediction and overall robustness compared to baselines. |
HS-GC: Holistic Semantic Embedding and Global Contrast for Effective Text Clustering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce Holistic Semantic Embedding and Global Contrast (HS-GC) to learn the instance- and cluster-level representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel loss function that exploits different layers of semantic information in a deep neural network to provide a more holistic semantic text representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on five text datasets and improves clustering accuracy of 5.9% and 3.2% on the StackOverflow and TREC datasets. |
A Knowledge Regularized Hierarchical Approach for Emotion Cause Analysis (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Emotion cause analysis aims to identify the reasons behind emotions . previous models focus on learning architecture with local textual information . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract emotion cause with hierarchical neural model and knowledge-based regularizations by sentiment lexicon and common knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two public datasets in different languages and outperformed competitive baselines by 2.08%. |
Lightweight LLM Agent Memory with Small Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaquan Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Zhenzhen Huang, Pengcheng Zheng, Zhicheng Wang, Ping Guo, Fan Mo, Sung-Ho Bae, Jie Zou, Jiwei Wei, Yang Yang
| Challenge: | Existing external memory systems for LLMs have low online overhead but are unstable in accumulating latency over long interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models . lightmem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation . they show consistent gains across model scales and high efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves agent memory but has low latency and low online overhead . it separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation . the proposed system achieves an average F1 improvement of 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo . |
Triggerless Backdoor Attack for NLP Tasks with Clean Labels (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Leilei Gan, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaoya Li, Yuxian Meng, Fei Wu, Yi Yang, Shangwei Guo, Chun Fan
| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a new threat to neural natural language processing models due to the fragility and lack of interpretability of NLP models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to perform backdoor attacks without an external trigger . they propose to use clean-labeled examples to generate poisoned clean-labelled examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is effective and hard to defend due to its triggerless nature. |
Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality? (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are often criticized for failures that happen without competency awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends conventional NMT with a self-estimator to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on translation tasks intact and on quality estimation tasks better than existing methods. |
Contextual Domain Classification with Temporal Representations (2021.naacl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies that incorporate context in SLU have focused on domains where context is limited to a few minutes. |
| Approach: | They propose temporal representations that combine wall-clock second difference and turn order offset information to utilize both recent and distant context in a novel large-scale setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces 13.04% of classification errors compared to baseline . previous studies have focused on domains where context is limited to a few minutes . |
Multimodal Inconsistency Reasoning (MMIR): A New Benchmark for Multimodal Reasoning Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are predominantly trained on consistent visual-textual inputs, leaving open the question of whether they can handle semantic mismatches in layout-rich content. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal inconsistency reasoning to assess MLLMs' ability to reason about semantic mismatches in webpages, presentation slides, and posters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in detecting inconsistencies in webpages, presentation slides, and posters while remaining vulnerable to inconsistent errors. |
COSMOS: Connectivity-Oriented Submodular Maximization for Optimal Subgraph Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms treat facts independently or employ myopic search, failing to optimize collective subgraph utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formalizes evidence retrieval as a constrained submodular maximization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the trade-off between information relevance and structural complexity. |
NL2TL: Transforming Natural Languages to Temporal Logics using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Temporal Logic (TL) can be used to specify complex high-level specifications for systems in many engineering domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for translation between NL and TL using Large Language Models . they use a dataset to create a model with 23K NL-TL pairs and human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher accuracy (> 95%) using only 10% training data compared with baseline model. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
Multiplex Graph Neural Network for Extractive Text Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extractive text summarization do not consider multiple types of inter-sentential relationships, nor model intra-sententential relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to combine different types of relationships among sentences and words to model sentence embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with existing methods on CNN/DailyMail benchmark dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness. |
SeedBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Seed Science (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Ying, Zihong Chen, Zhefan Wang, Wanli Jiang, Chenyang Wang, Zhonghang Yuan, Haoyang Su, Huanjun Kong, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, but its application in seed science remains limited due to a shortage of experts and limited availability of online resources. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 26 leading large language models and compare them against a set of benchmarks . they find that there is a gap between the power of LLMs and real-world seed science problems . |
| Outcome: | The new seed benchmark highlights the gap between the power of large language models and real-world seed science problems. |
Enhancing Explainable Rating Prediction through Annotated Macro Concepts (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models learn user and item embeddings and generate reasons based on these embedds. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based explanation framework that leverages macro concepts to bridge the gap between the user/item embeddings and the recommendation reasons. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three datasets prove the proposed model is superior to existing models. |
TInR: Exploring Tool-Internalized Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on external tool documentation during reasoning, leading to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage that integrates external tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) to address these issues, they propose 'tool-internet-based' reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance across in-domain and out-of-domain settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency. |
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Zhichao Yang, Gen Li, Ye Qiu, Zhaoxin Fan, Yifan Sun, Wenjun wu, Jin Dong, Xiaotie Deng
| Challenge: | Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead. |
Towards Noise-Tolerant Speech-Referring Video Object Segmentation: Bridging Speech and Text (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
Evaluating Large Language Models on Wikipedia-Style Survey Generation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Fan Gao, Hang Jiang, Rui Yang, Qingcheng Zeng, Jinghui Lu, Moritz Blum, Tianwei She, Yuang Jiang, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models can perform well in general tasks, but their effectiveness and limitations in domainspecific tasks remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They examine the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating succinct survey articles specific to the niche field of NLP in computer science. |
| Outcome: | The LLMs perform better in generating succinct survey articles specific to the niche field of NLP in computer science, compared to human-authored surveys, but they exhibit bias in evaluation. |
Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Defective queries impact the robustness of conversational AI systems such as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. |
| Approach: | They propose a Personalized Query Rewriting system that takes into account individual preferences or unique error patterns identified from a user's historical interactions with the conversational AI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has been proven on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments. |
Markov Chain of Thought for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have sought to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov Chain of Thought (MCoT) that compresses previous reasoning steps into a simplified question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves efficiency and maintains comparable accuracy. |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Analyzing the Effects of Supervised Fine-Tuning on Model Knowledge from Token and Parameter Levels (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Yuming Yang, Yang Nan, Shuo Li, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pretraining, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). |
| Approach: | They evaluate closed-book question answering (CBQA) performance across five LLMs from the LLaMA-2 and LLama-3 families and examine the impact of supervised fine-tuning on model knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is 14% worse than models fine-tuned on 1,920 samples and 12% worse on 240 samples. |
HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Model-based Large Language Model Customization as Service (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language model services require users to upload data for fine-tuning . current methods for customization are noisy and require sensitive domain data . |
| Approach: | *Llamdex is a framework that facilitates LLM customization as a service . client uploads pre-trained domain-specific *models* rather than data . |
| Outcome: | *Llamdex* framework improves domain-specific accuracy by up to 26% over state-of-the-art private data synthesis methods . |
Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TeachMaster: Generative Teaching via Code (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jie Zhang, Jingru Fan, Tianle Zhou, Ruoyu Fu, Huatao Li, Ruijie Shi, Siheng Chen, Weinan E, Chen Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating video content are limited by high costs and slow update cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shifting educators from manual creators to high-level directors who focus on pedagogical intents while agents handle execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces production costs to 0.3% of traditional course videos and provides a robust solution for scalable education. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang, Chang Liu, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok, Weiming Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
Why Can Distillation Work with Limited Resources? A Systematic Study (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Hu, Xingyu Lu, Liyuan Mao, YiFan Zhang, Tianke Zhang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have driven reasoning performance . low-resource distillation can boost models' performance, but a framework is missing . |
| Approach: | They conduct a controlled experiment to find out why low-resource distillation can boost model performance . they find that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows more flexible reasoning, the authors show . they show that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
Predicting Personal Opinion on Future Events with Fingerprints (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict users’ opinions on going events may not be able to acquire such content and thus cannot infer an unbiased opinion on emerging events. |
| Approach: | They propose to model opinion on unseen articles based on one’s fingerprinting: the prior reading and commenting history. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict user’s opinion on unseen articles based on one’s fingerprinting: the prior reading and commenting history. |
Denoising Concept Vectors with Sparse Autoencoders for Improved Language Model Steering (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for steering concept vectors suffer from noisy features in diverse datasets that undermine steering robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse Autoencoder-Denoised Concept Vector (SDCV) which selectively keeps the most discriminative SAE latents while reconstructing hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves steering success rates by 4-16% across six challenging concepts while maintaining topic relevance. |
VenusFactory: An Integrated System for Protein Engineering with Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao, Wu Banghao, Mingchen Li, Ruilin Wang, Lingrong Zhang, Huiqun Yu, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong, Bingxin Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained protein language models have been used in protein engineering, but their adoption is limited due to data collection, task benchmarking, and application challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed engine integrates biological data retrieval, task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
Multimodal Context Carryover (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Prashan Wanigasekara, Nalin Gupta, Fan Yang, Emre Barut, Zeynab Raeesy, Kechen Qin, Stephen Rawls, Xinyue Liu, Chengwei Su, Spurthi Sandiri
| Challenge: | Existing voice-only dialogue systems lack multimodality support, which can lead to costly system redesigns. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment existing voice-only dialogue systems with additional multimodal components to facilitate quick delivery of visual modality support with minimal changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual modality support with minimal changes on an in-house multi-modal visual navigation data set. |
SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xun Liang, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li, Sensen Zhang, Hanyu Wang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhaoxin Fan, Bo Tang, Jihao Zhao, Jiawei Yang, Shichao Song, Mengwei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) however, the incorporation of external knowledge increases the vulnerability of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the RAG security using a dataset . they classify attack tasks into silver noise, inter-context conflict, soft ad, and white Denial-of-Service . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the security of RAG against 14 representative RAG components. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
RefGPT: Dialogue Generation of GPT, by GPT, and for GPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate huge truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. |
Hate Speech Detection Based on Sentiment Knowledge Sharing (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hate speech detection are stereotyped and biased . et al., a paper examining the effectiveness of multitask learning in hate speech recognition tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a hate speech detection framework based on sentiment knowledge sharing . they extract affective features of the target sentence and use sentiment features from external resources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect hate speech over two public datasets. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yadong Xi, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lei Lin, Yanjiang Chen, Shuhan Yang, Xuhan Chen, Kailun Tao, Zhi Li, Gongzheng Li, Lin Jiang, Siyan Liu, Zeng Zhao, Minlie Huang, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |
EdgeInfinite: A Memory-Efficient Infinite-Context Transformer for Edge Devices (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KV cache optimizations struggle with irreversible token eviction in long-output tasks . alternative sequence modeling architectures prove costly to adopt within established Transformer infrastructures. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient solution for infinite contexts that integrates compressed memory into Transformer-based LLMs through a trainable memory-gating module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves comparable performance to baseline Transformer-based LLMs while optimizing memory consumption and time to first token. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |