Papers by Yang He
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
Beyond Chunks and Graphs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Triplet-Driven Thinking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is critical for reducing hallucinations and incorporating external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages an LLM to decompose questions into searchable triplets with placeholders. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that T2RAG outperforms state-of-the-art multi-round and Graph RAG methods while reducing retrieval costs by up to 45%. |
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. |
Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Guangyi Liu, Zeyu Feng, Yuan Gao, Zichao Yang, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to composable text operations often require plug-and-play . a single LM can perform arbitrary text operation composition in the latent space . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient approach for composable text operations in the latent space of text . they connect pretrained LMs to the laten space and adapt them to the space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on existing methods in the latent space of text. |
JointCL: A Joint Contrastive Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods achieve promising performance in in-target stance detection when trained and tested on the same datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint contrastive learning framework to generalize stance features for unseen targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
SwiftPrune: Hessian-Free Weight Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a novel post-training pruning method relies on the Hessian matrix to perform pruning . current pruning methods are computationally intensive and lack performance due to second-order derivative calculations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hessian-free weight pruning method that reduces computational burden . they use an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average technique to bypass weight sorting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves hardware-efficient model compression by eliminating computational intensive calculations. |
Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) struggle to identify relevant medical knowledge and generate accurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical dialogue system that integrates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment to improve medical knowledge and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy. |
Addressing Troublesome Words in Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has weaknesses in handling lowfrequency and ambiguous words, which we refer to as troublesome words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual memory to memorize which target words should be produced in which situations to translate troublesome words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on Chinese-to-English and English-to German translation tasks. |
ChessArena: A Chess Testbed for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on isolated question-answering tasks that may not capture the essential aspects of strategic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 13 large language models across over 800 games in chess . they use a chessian-based framework to test strategic reasoning and pattern recognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and basic understanding of large language models. |
On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained contextual representations like BERT have been widely used for NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform anisotropic sentence embedding distribution to smooth and isotropic Gaussian distribution by normalizing flows that are learned with an unsupervised objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art embeddings on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. |
Reason from Fallacy: Enhancing Large Language Models’ Logical Reasoning through Logical Fallacy Understanding (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but struggle with some more complex reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose five concrete tasks from three cognitive dimensions of WHAT, WHY, and HOW to evaluate LLMs’ capability of logical fallacy understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate LLMs’ LFU capability and to fine-tune LLM models to obtain significantly enhanced performance on logical reasoning. |
WaveDetect: Robust Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection via Wavelet Transform (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting LLM-generated texts falter when faced with adversarial perturbations, cross-domain shifts, and the rapid temporal evolution of the foundation model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates text detection as a signal processing task within the time-frequency domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior accuracy and robustness against sophisticated attacks and generalization across out-of-distribution topics. |
SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiaochen Wang, Junqing He, Liang Chen, Gholamreza Haffari, Yiru Wang, Zhe Yang, Xiangdi Meng, Kunhao Pan, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) is a challenging task that requires models to answer multiple questions with multiple passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided prompting finite state machine to improve multi-hop reasoning abilities by iterating over multiple questions and correcting itself to improve accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on Musique and other datasets. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing ASQP datasets are small and low-density, hindering technical advancement . et al. (2017): aspect sentiment quad prediction provides a complete aspect-level sentiment structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-step solution for Aspect sentiment quad prediction that can detect aspect categories and identify aspectopinion-sentiment triplets simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can detect aspect categories and identify aspectopinion-sentiment triplets simultaneously. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
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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. |
Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies construct attack prompts via manual or automatic methods, but these methods have limitations on cost and quality. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack framework to instruct LLMs to mimic human-generated prompts through in-context learning and a defense framework that fine-tunes victim LLM's through iterative interactions with the attack framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on experiments on different LLMs to evaluate their effectiveness against red teaming attacks. |
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Automated synthesis of zeolite holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly expedite automated synthesis of zeolites owing to its machine readability. |
Enhancing Automated Essay Scoring Performance via Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models with Combination of Regression and Ranking (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on sentence prediction tasks uses shallow neural networks to learn essay representations and constrain calculated scores with regression loss or ranking loss. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained language model to learn text representations first and then to constrain the scores with regression loss or ranking loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the Automated Student Assessment Prize dataset. |
Knowledge-Empowered Representation Learning for Chinese Medical Reading Comprehension: Task, Model and Resources (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | MRC is a popular task in NLP, aiming to understand a passage and answer the relevant questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-target machine learning task for the medical domain that predicts answers to medical questions and corresponding support sentences from medical information sources simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by fusing context-aware and knowledge-awful token representations. |
Distantly Supervised NER with Partial Annotation Learning and Reinforcement Learning (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese are limited by the lack of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can automatically populate annotated training data without humancost by using distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than comparison systems on two datasets. |
TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tables models require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms strong baselines on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQ. |
PiCSAR: Probabilistic Confidence Selection and Ranking for Reasoning Chains (2026.findings-acl)
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Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Zheng Zhao, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Sohee Yang, Wai-Chung Kwan, Xuanli He, Wenda Li, Pasquale Minervini, Eleonora Giunchiglia, Shay B Cohen
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large reasoning models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that scores each candidate generation using the joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines with 2x fewer samples in 20 out of 25 comparisons. |
Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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Pengcheng He, Baolin Peng, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Ruochen Xu, Hany Hassan, Yu Shi, Chenguang Zhu, Wayne Xiong, Michael Zeng, Jianfeng Gao, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | Z-Code++ is a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization that uses a two-phase pre-training technique to improve model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the competing models on low-resource summarization tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Tianwei Lin, Jiang Liu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yang Dai, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Wanggui He, Juncheng Li, Jiannan Guo, Hao Jiang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning are resource-efficient, but performance often falls short . a new approach, TeamLoRA, integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts to improve learning efficiency . teamLoRA integrates collaborative and competition modules to improve model learning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TeamLoRA improves performance in multi-task learning . teamLorea integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance . |
A Surprisingly Effective Fix for Deep Latent Variable Modeling of Text (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders are powerful language models and effective representation learning frameworks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fix for posterior collapse which improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction and latent representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed fix significantly improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction, and latent representation learning compared with previous state-of-the-art methods. |
UniArk: Improving Generalisation and Consistency for Factual Knowledge Extraction through Debiasing (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated the potential of language models as knowledge bases and the existence of severe biases when extracting factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adapter-based framework for generalised factual knowledge extraction using simple methods without introducing extra parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the model’s out-of-domain generalisation and consistency under various prompts. |
CPL: Counterfactual Prompt Learning for Vision and Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xuehai He, Diji Yang, Weixi Feng, Tsu-Jui Fu, Arjun Akula, Varun Jampani, Pradyumna Narayana, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods tend to learn spurious or entangled representations, leading to poor generalization to unseen concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning technique that tunes the learnable prompt for pre-trained vision and language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves few-shot performance on vision and language tasks over existing prompt tuning methods. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
BrailleLLM: Braille Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Braille Domain Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tianyuan Huang, Zepeng Zhu, Hangdi Xing, Zirui Shao, Zhi Yu, Chaoxiong Yang, Jiaxian He, Xiaozhong Liu, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Existing Braille research focuses on isolated tasks while mixed-content Braille tasks face data scarcity and ambiguities. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax tree-based augmentation method tailored for Braille data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Braille translation, formula-to-Braille conversion, and mixed-text translation. |
Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
E-ConvRec: A Large-Scale Conversational Recommendation Dataset for E-Commerce Customer Service (2022.lrec-1)
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Meihuizi Jia, Ruixue Liu, Peiying Wang, Yang Song, Zexi Xi, Haobin Li, Xin Shen, Meng Chen, Jinhui Pang, Xiaodong He
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing conversational recommendation system (CRS), which provides valuable recommendations to users through conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct an authentic Chinese dialogue dataset consisting of over 25k dialogues and 770k utterances, which contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
Swift Cross-Dataset Pruning: Enhancing Fine-Tuning Efficiency in Natural Language Understanding (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches for fine-tuning datasets rely on expensive sample ranking processes . data set pruning aims to select a subset of a dataset for efficient model training . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses TF-IDF embeddings with geometric median to rapidly evaluate sample importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces training and storage costs while maintaining model effectiveness. |
CR-GIS: Improving Conversational Recommendation via Goal-aware Interest Sequence Modeling (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a goal item by sequentially tracking users’ interests ignore the rich goal-aware implicit interest sequence patterns in a dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose to model goal-aware implicit user interest sequence patterns in a dialog and a hierarchical Star Transformer to guide multi-turn utterances generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more accurate recommendations with more fluent and coherent dialog utterances. |
Amalgamating Knowledge from Two Teachers for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Adversarial Training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue systems require a large number of handcrafted features and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a "Two-Teacher One-Student" learning framework for task-oriented dialogue . the framework amalgamates knowledge from two teacher networks and provides guidance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on two benchmark datasets . it can retrieve accurate KB entities and generate human-like responses simultaneously . |
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaming Zhou, Shiyao Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiabei He, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Cheng Liu, Aobo Kong, Yujie Guo, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
Harmonizing the Past, Present, and Future: A Null-Space Constrained Region-Specific Method for Continual Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Jinhui Chen, Shizhu He, Xingchang Yang, Huanxuan Liao, Yequan Wang, Xiangwen Liao, Wenhao Teng, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing continual learning paradigms prioritize instant performance through dense updates, leading to catastrophic forgetting and rapid exhaustion of model capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that preserves previously acquired knowledge and acquires new task-specific skills while preserving sufficient parameter capacity for subsequent adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the brain's functional partitioning and can be used to map tasks between specialized and generalist neurons. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
Can Multiple Responses from an LLM Reveal the Sources of Its Uncertainty? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can produce unreliable or misleading outputs, posing challenges for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They employ an auxiliary LLM to analyze the patterns of disagreement among LLMs . they validate their framework on AmbigQA, OpenBookQA, and MMLU-Pro . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to diagnose uncertainty sources in a model with an auxiliary model. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
A Semi-Supervised Stable Variational Network for Promoting Replier-Consistency in Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods favor uninformative and non replier-specific responses due to lack of relevant information guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a semi-supervised variable network to generate replier-specific responses . they use vMF as latent space to obtain stable KL performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two large conversation datasets and generates diverse and replier-specific responses. |
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)
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Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Ziyan Ma, Haoyang He, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Zihua Rong, Rongjin Li, Kun Ji, Qing Huang, Xinyang Hu, Yang Liu, Qianhe Zheng
| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
MaskTab: Scalable Masked Tabular Pretraining with Scaling Laws and Distillation for Industrial Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is high-dimensional, riddled with missing entries, and rarely labeled at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified pre-training framework for industrial-scale tabular data . MaskTab encodes missing values via dedicated learnable tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms XGBoost and MaskTab-L on industrial-scale . it achieves +5.04% AUC and +8.28% KS over prior art under rigorous scaling . |
Efficient Pretraining Data Selection for Language Models via Multi-Actor Collaboration (2025.acl-long)
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Tianyi Bai, Ling Yang, Zhen Hao Wong, Fupeng Sun, Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Chi Zhang, Lijun Wu, Qiu Jiantao, Wentao Zhang, Binhang Yuan, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of language models . limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between data selection methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-actor collaborative data selection mechanism that prioritizes data based on its specific criterion and updates prioritization rules using the current state of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates convergence in LM pretraining and achieves an average relative performance gain of 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks. |
Towards Hierarchical Multi-Step Reward Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Teng Wang, Jiang Zhangyi, Zhenqi He, Hailei Gong, Shenyang Tong, Wenhan Yang, Zeyu Li, Yanan Zheng, Zifan He, Zewen Ye, Shengjie Ma, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) are vulnerable to reward hacking and require expensive, large-scale annotation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model approach which evaluates both individual and consecutive reasoning steps from fine-grained and coarse-grounded level. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model performs better than existing PRMs and is more robust than existing models. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
BC-Prover: Backward Chaining Prover for Formal Theorem Proving (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for interactive theorem proving in formal logic lack robustness and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a backward chaining framework guided by pseudo steps for proofstep generation that prioritizes pseudo steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the miniF2F benchmark. |
LogicAsker: Evaluating and Improving the Logical Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuxuan Wan, Wenxuan Wang, Yiliu Yang, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Pinjia He, Wenxiang Jiao, Michael Lyu
| Challenge: | LogicAsker examines and improves the reasoning abilities of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of atomic reasoning skills grounded in propositional and predicate logic to examine and improve the reasoning abilities of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reasoning abilities in large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 by up to 5%. |
Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning to Defend Word-level Adversarial Text Attack (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks . previous word-based search methods assume important words influence prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for similarizing the influence of words with contrast learning that encourages model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with various training methods and improves model robustness against various adversarial attacks. |
Are We in the AI-Generated Text World Already? Quantifying and Monitoring AIGT on Social Media (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social media platforms are experiencing a growing presence of AI-Generated Texts (AIGTs) however, the misuse of AIGTs could have profound implications for public opinion . |
| Approach: | They collect a dataset with 2.4M posts from 3 major social media platforms . they then construct a diverse dataset to train and evaluate AIGT detectors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset analyzes 2.4M posts from 3 major social media platforms from 2022 to 2024 . it finds that Medium and Quora show marked increases in AAR . |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios. |
A Boundary Offset Prediction Network for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing . span-based methods assign entity types to text spans, resulting in imbalanced sample space . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that predicts boundary offsets between candidate and nearest spans . the method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on eight widely-used NER datasets. |
A Generative Model for End-to-End Argument Mining with Reconstructed Positional Encoding and Constrained Pointer Mechanism (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining (AM) is a challenging task as it requires recognizing complex argumentation structures involving multiple subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework where expected outputs of AM are framed as a simple target sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two AM benchmarks. |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
Word-level Commonsense Knowledge Selection for Event Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Event Detection (ED) is a task of automatically extracting multi-class trigger words . Xie and Tu, 2022, use a Context-specific Knowledge Selector to select commonsense knowledge of words based on living contexts . |
| Approach: | They use a Context-specific Knowledge Selector to select the exact commonsense knowledge of words from a large knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the F1-score of about 78.3% on the ACE-2005 dataset. |
Syntactic Graph Convolutional Network for Spoken Language Understanding (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on slot filling and intent detection builds joint models without prior knowledge of linguistic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint model that integrates syntactic structure for learning slot filling and intent detection jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two public benchmark datasets and further improves on slot filling and intent detection. |
Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing transformer models are computationally demanding and prohibitively costly for long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of its selfattention module. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model that inherits weights from large pretrained models by removing redundancies in hidden sequences using the ready-made Fast Fourier Transform operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the standard BART model on the long-range modeling benchmark LRA with significant improvements in speed and space. |
Threshold-driven Pruning with Segmented Maximum Term Weights for Approximate Cluster-based Sparse Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using rank score thresholding, sparse retrieval skips the index at cluster and document levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning control scheme with a probabilistic guarantee on rank-safeness competitiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning control scheme improves accuracy and safeness while delivering low latency on single-threaded CPU. |
Eye Movement Features Can Predict Human Preferences on Machine-Generated Texts (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on eye movement in text quality assessment are limited . eye-movement features are important predictors of human judgments of text quality, but are costly and inconsistent. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture eye-movement features during screen reading of LLM-generated text using a dataset that includes eye-motion recordings, reading-time measurements, and post-reading evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that eye-movement features can significantly improve models over other probabilistic metrics, including negative log-likelihood (NLL). |
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 . |
Measuring Bargaining Abilities of LLMs: A Benchmark and A Buyer-Enhancement Method (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Using a novel approach, we can evaluate an agent’s bargaining abilities as an asymmetric incomplete information game. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the buyer’s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned. |
Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroring (2025.naacl-long)
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Honglin Mu, Han He, Yuxin Zhou, Yunlong Feng, Yang Xu, Libo Qin, Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Xudong Han, Qi Shi, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback . existing methods may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that guides malicious prompt construction by local training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 92% attack success rate and 80% stealth rate on a subset of AdvBench. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
KLMo: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Fine-Grained Relationships (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pretrained language models focus on entity information and ignore fine-grained relationships between entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate KG into the language learning process to obtain a KG-enhanced pretrained Language Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on several knowledge-driven tasks, such as entity typing and relation classification, compared with the state-of-the-art knowledge-enhanced PLMs. |
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. |
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. |
TopKG: Target-oriented Dialog via Global Planning on Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing target-oriented dialogs take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a global planning method for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph to adjust local response generation towards the global target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses. |
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack. |
| Approach: | They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks. |
Beyond the First Error: Process Reward Models for Reflective Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective PRMs focus on the first incorrect step and all preceding steps, assuming that all subsequent steps are incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose a data annotation method specifically designed to score the long CoT reasoning process by using an LLM-based judger for annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves PRMs' ability to identify effective self-correction behaviors and reasoning based on erroneous steps. |
Relevant Emotion Ranking from Text Constrained with Emotion Relationships (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect emotions from text are lexicon-based and learning-based . experimental results show that the proposed framework is better than state-of-the-art methods . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-label classification problem to generate a ranked list of relevant emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than state-of-the-art methods and multi-label learning methods on two real-world corpora. |
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Jian Yang, Zhongjiang He, Changzai Pan, Jiaheng Liu, Xianjie Wu, Yu Zhao, Shuangyong Song, Yongxiang Li, Zhoujun Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Tables are a widely used data format that poses unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a region-based reinforcement learning approach that integrates region evidence into reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets and significantly reduces the reasoning token consumption by 67.5%. |
Evaluating and Improving Graph to Text Generation with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized natural language processing due to their zero-and-short-shot capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free prompting approach for graph-to-text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LLMs on graph-to-text generation tasks incrementally. |
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Pan, Rui Yang, Han Wang, Zhuan Zhou, Xuming He, Wenxiang Guo, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Li, Yu Zhang, Chenyuhao Wen, Ke Lei, Xiang Yin, Jingyu Lu, Zhiyuan Zhu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
InfiMM: Advancing Multimodal Understanding with an Open-Sourced Visual Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Yiqi Wang, Xiaotian Han, Bohan Zhai, Yongfei Liu, Wentao Chen, Yiren Jian, Yunzhe Tao, Jianbo Yuan, Ran He, Hongxia Yang
| Challenge: | InfiMM is a multimodal large language model that adapts to complex vision-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a Multimodal Large Language Model that adapts to intricate vision-language tasks using large-scale training data and comprehensive training strategies. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations across a variety of benchmarks underscore InfiMM’s remarkable capability in multimodal understanding. |
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanjun Zhao, Tianxin Wei, Jiaru Zou, Xuying Ning, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Simmi Rana, Wendy H. Yang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers. |
TDEER: An Efficient Translating Decoding Schema for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract entities and relations from unstructured texts are difficult to handle due to the overlapping triple problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation decoding schema for joint extraction of entities and relations from unstructured texts to form factual triples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle the overlapping triple problem, and is 2 times faster than the state-of-the-art models. |
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. |
Exploiting Noisy Data in Distant Supervision Relation Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation classification are noisy and time-consuming . RCEND uses noisy data to split noisy data into correctly and incorrectly labeled data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance relation classification by exploiting noisy data . they use an instance discriminator with reinforcement learning to split noisy data into correctly and incorrectly labeled data based on the noisy data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on relation classification . the proposed method is based on a semi-supervised learning method . |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
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Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
RAP-ID: Mechanistic Prompt Injection Detection via Impostor Behavior Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses rely on externally deployed guardrail models or response inspection . current defenses depend on external guardrails or response inspecting . |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic, train-free detection framework that operates exclusively on internal state dynamics during the initial forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with significant overall improvements compared to heuristic methods. |
LeanK: Learnable K Cache Channel Pruning for Efficient Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to optimize the key-value (KV) cache include: (1) Eviction, which discards cache of less important tokens; (2) Selection, which retains the full KV cache but selectively reads relevant entries. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based method that prunes unimportant key (K) cache channels by leveraging static channel sparsity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LeanK reduces GPU memory and accelerates decoding without sacrificing accuracy. |
FlagEvalMM: A Flexible Framework for Comprehensive Multimodal Model Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | FlagEvalMM is an evaluation framework designed to assess multimodal models . it is designed to be used for vision-language understanding and generation tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that decouples model inference from evaluation through an independent evaluation service. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation framework offers accurate and efficient insights into model strengths and limitations. |
SWE-Swiss: A Multi-Task Fine-Tuning and RL Recipe for High-Performance Issue Resolution (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyu He, Qingping Yang, Wei Shen, Xiaojian Zhong, Kechi Zhang, Chenxin An, Wenlei Shi, Tianle Cai, Di He, Jiaze Chen, Jingjing Xu
| Challenge: | SWE-Swiss-32B demonstrates strong generalization to other common LLM benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase training recipe that decomposes issue resolution into three core skills: Localization, Repair, and Unit Test Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 60.2% score on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark and is in the top-tier performance bracket of much larger models. |
MCGA: A Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (2026.findings-acl)
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Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Bihe Zhang, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Liangyu Huo, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie, Daojing He, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced Chinese Classical Studies (CCS) but the audio dimension of CCS remains underexplored due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific audio corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a 119-hour audio corpus comprising 22,000 audio samples to bridge this gap . it encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering ( SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR). |
Automatic Slide Updating with User-Defined Dynamic Templates and Natural Language Instructions (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing automation methods follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored decks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework updates content while preserving layout and style while maintaining a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide. |
ProjectEval: A Benchmark for Programming Agents Automated Evaluation on Project-Level Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack the ability to automatically evaluate from users’ perspective and lack the explainability of the results of LLM agents’ code generation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for LLM agents' automated evaluation by simulating user interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can evaluate the generated projects by user interaction simulation and by code similarity through existing objective indicators. |
Synonym-unaware Fast Adversarial Training against Textual Adversarial Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial defense methods rely on predetermined linguistic knowledge and assume that attackers’ synonym candidates are known, which is often unrealistic. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast Adversarial Training method that leverages single-step perturbation generation and effective perturbation initialization to improve model robustness without requiring synonym awareness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing models under character-level and word-level attacks while still maintaining the correct syntax. |
Robustness-Aware Word Embedding Improves Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Embedding interval bound constraint is important for NLP models to be certified robust, but adversarial examples can be crafted by synonym substitutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a triplet loss to train robustness-aware word embeddings for better certified robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art certified defense baselines and generalizes well to unseen substitutions. |
Discourse Marker Augmented Network with Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Inference (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to natural language inference focus on interaction architectures of sentences . but, we propose to transfer knowledge from discourse markers to augment the model . |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer knowledge from discourse markers to augment the quality of the NLI model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale datasets. |
Decomposing Argumentative Essay Generation via Dialectical Planning of Complex Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG) is a challenging task in computational argumentation, where detailed logical reasoning and effective rhetorical skills are essential. |
| Approach: | They propose an argumentative planning strategy for prompting large language models to generate high-quality essays by sketch planning and dialectical planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more dialectical and persuasive essays with higher diversity compared to baselines. |
Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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Guangyi Liu, Zichao Yang, Tianhua Tao, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Zhen Li, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss method which computes the matching loss of a target sequence with all n-grams in the generated sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the common CE loss and strong baselines on a wide range of tasks. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text summarization is a key natural language generation task, but the high cost of inaccurate summaries raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarisation (UE-TS) evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a UE-TS benchmark that evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. |
KERS: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Recommendation Dialog Systems with Multiple Subgoals (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for multi-subgoal dialogs require a system to build a social bond with users to gain trust and develop affinity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for common knowledge-based multi-subgoal dialogs that divides up conversations with multiple subgoals and propose mechanisms to filter noisy knowledge and to include cleaned knowledge in the dialog response generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework obtains state-of-the-art results on a DuRecDial dataset in both automatic and human evaluation. |
Demonstration Retrieval-Augmented Generative Event Argument Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method outperforms all strong baselines and can be generalized to various datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative EAE that uses event knowledge-injected generator and demonstration retriever to generate event arguments from training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and can be generalized to various datasets. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
Domain-Lifelong Learning for Dialogue State Tracking via Knowledge Preservation Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Multi-perspective Preference Alignment of LLMs for Programming-Community Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on a high-quality, real-world PCQA dataset validate its accuracy and preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective preference alignment for programming-community question answering to generate user-centric responses. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a high-quality, real-world PCQA dataset validate the proposed model's accuracy and preference. |
GLIMPSE: Do Large Vision-Language Models Truly Think With Videos or Just Glimpse at Them? (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yiyang Zhou, Linjie Li, Shi Qiu, Zhengyuan Yang, Yuyang Zhao, Siwei Han, Yangfan He, Kangqi Li, Haonian Ji, Zihao Zhao, Haibo Tong, Lijuan Wang, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Existing video benchmarks often resemble image-based questions with scans of only a few key frames, without deep temporal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a video benchmark to assess whether large vision-language models can genuinely think with videos rather than perform superficial frame-level analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 3,269 videos and over 4,342 highly visual-centric questions across 11 categories, including Trajectory Analysis, Temporal Reasoning, and Forensics Detection. |
Accelerating Prefilling via Decoding-time Contribution Sparsity (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods exploit attention score sparsity by estimating blocks with high attention scores and applying dynamic sparse attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which replaces dense attention with Triangle attention in a subset of layers to reduce the time needed to decode. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TriangleMix achieves near-lossless performance on long-context and long-constrast reasoning benchmarks while significantly improving efficiency. |
Dual Dynamic Memory Network for End-to-End Multi-turn Task-oriented Dialog Systems (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialog systems struggle to dynamically model long dialog context for interactions and effectively incorporate knowledge base (KB) information into dialog generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual dynamic memory network for multi-turn dialog generation . the model dynamically expands the dialog memory turn by turn and keeps track of dialog history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets on human evaluation and automatic evaluation. |
ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to measuring and optimizing proactive task-oriented agents lack generalizable end-to-end solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conversational task scheduling that integrates proactiveness reinforcement learning with a domain-agnostic annotation methodology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables scalable proactiveness reinforcement learning (RL) Experiments on two newly auto-annotated datasets demonstrate significant improvements in proactive timing while maintaining action consistency comparable to state-of-the-art baselines. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
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. |
Reading Like HER: Human Reading Inspired Extractive Summarization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting text summarization are abstractive and extractive. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for extractive summarization by simulating two stages . they adopt a convolutional neural network to encode gist of paragraphs for rough reading . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art extractive methods on CNN and DailyMail datasets. |
Scattered Hypothesis Generation for Open-Ended Event Forecasting (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event forecasting focus on the most probable outcomes, neglecting the intrinsic uncertainty of real-world events. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes inclusiveness and diversity of the hypothesis by integrating validity-gated score into the overall objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two real-world benchmark datasets. |
InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Runing Yang, Zihao Lin, Qifan Wang, Ankith Mohan, Jianfeng He, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, often producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The framework outperforms existing methods in the hallucination detection benchmark HaluEval and the previous methods at the same time. |
Interpretable Relevant Emotion Ranking with Event-Driven Attention (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies ignore the latent event information in documents . Existing methods for detecting emotions are limited to a few words . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate event information into a deep learning architecture to extract relevant emotion ranking models using corpus-level event embeddings and document-level events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than state-of-the-art emotion detection and multi-label approaches on three real-world corpora and interpretable results shed light on the events which trigger certain emotions. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
Position Engineering: Boosting Large Language Models through Positional Information Manipulation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant strides towards achieving artificial general intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique termed position engineering which alters the positional information in the prompt without modifying the text itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique significantly improves on the baseline in retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning scenarios. |
ExeCoder: Empowering Large Language Models with Executability Representation for Code Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Minghua He, Yue Chen, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Wenjie Yin, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code translation models only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM specifically designed for code translation called ExeCoder . it uses executability representations such as functional semantics and syntax structures to enhance LLMs' capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing open-source code translation models on two metrics. |
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuzhe Yang, Yifei Zhang, Yan Hu, Yilin Guo, Ruoli Gan, Yueru He, Mingcong Lei, Xiao Zhang, Haining Wang, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Honghai Yu, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their potential applications in finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the ability of large language models to handle financial tasks using human expert evaluations and task-specific interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to handle complex financial tasks and combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for conversational machine reading comprehension are inconsistent with real scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese CMRC benchmark to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains by using zero-shot/few-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns and cover 33 domains. |
An Interpretable Neural Network with Topical Information for Relevant Emotion Ranking (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the extracted emotion-associated topic words represent emotion-evoking events. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable neural network approach for relevant emotion ranking . they initialize the hidden layer to approximate the behavior of topic models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better than state-of-the-art methods on real-world corpora. |
InfiMM-WebMath-40B: Advancing Multimodal Pre-Training for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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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 . |
Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building generalizable verifiable data are task-specific and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions and verification artifacts from a single source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes problems, candidates, and verification artifacts from human-annotated and strategy-induced checks and iteratively discovers strategies. |
The CRECIL Corpus: a New Dataset for Extraction of Relations between Characters in Chinese Multi-party Dialogues (2022.lrec-1)
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Yuru Jiang, Yang Xu, Yuhang Zhan, Weikai He, Yilin Wang, Zixuan Xi, Meiyun Wang, Xinyu Li, Yu Li, Yanchao Yu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on relation extraction between two entities in one sentence, and some focus on cross-sentence relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese multi-party dialogue dataset for automatic extraction of dialogue-based character relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extracts relationships between 140 entities on the CRECIL corpus and another existing relation extraction corpus. |
SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on automatic summary evaluation metrics focus on lexical similarity and require a reference summary which is expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a weakly supervised summary evaluation approach without the presence of reference summaries to transform existing summarization datasets into corrupted reference summarizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and shows that it improves linguistic quality over all metrics. |
Revisiting 3D LLM Benchmarks: Are We Really Testing 3D Capabilities? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D LLMs are evaluated on Q&A or captioning tasks rather than specific downstream tasks like object detection. |
| Approach: | They propose principles for better assessing genuine 3D understanding by explicitly separating 3D abilities from 1D or 2D aspects when evaluating 3D LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on the “2D-Cheating” problem in 3D LLM evaluation, suggesting that they are ineffective . |
Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation . when and why collective interaction expands the solution space remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to study diversity in multi-agent systems across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields diminishing diversity despite higher quality . the proposed model fails to expand diversity and causes it to collapse . |
FlagEval-Arena: A Side-by-Side Comparative Evaluation Platform for Large Language Models and Text-Driven AIGC (2025.acl-demo)
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Jing-Shu Zheng, Richeng Xuan, Bowen Qin, Zheqi He, Tongshuai.ren Tongshuai.ren, Xuejing Li, Jin-Ge Yao, Xi Yang
| Challenge: | a new evaluation platform for large language models and text-driven AIGCs is available for free. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation platform for side-by-side comparisons of large language models and text-driven AIGC systems. |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation platform for large language models and text-driven AIGC systems is available for free . the platform is more focused on the Chinese language and more models developed by Chinese institutes . |
SMedBERT: A Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Model with Structured Semantics for Medical Text Mining (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-based PLMs are based on linked-entity information, but they only use linked-enemy information as auxiliary information. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate semantic knowledge from neighbours of linked-entity into a medical PLM that integrates heterogeneous-entities into the homogeneously neighbouring entity structure. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SMedBERT outperforms baselines in knowledge-intensive Chinese medical tasks. |
AlignX: Advancing Multilingual Large Language Models with Multilingual Representation Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual large language models (LLMs) possess impressive multilingual understanding and generation capabilities, but performance and cross-lingual alignment often lag for non-dominant languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-level framework to enhance multilingual performance of pre-trained LLMs by integrating multilingual semantic alignment and language feature integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multilingual capability of pre-trained LLMs by bringing representations closer and improving cross-lingual alignment. |
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. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models without Performance Degradation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large vision-language models produce hallucinations that compromise output reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage framework for mitigating hallucinations without performance degradation . they propose semantic-aware component disentanglement and interpretable parameter updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces hallucinations by 23.4% while maintaining 97.4% of general generative capability. |
On the Intractability to Synthesize Factual Inconsistencies in Summarization (2024.findings-eacl)
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| 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. |
EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiahao Qiu, Yinghui He, Xinzhe Juan, Yimin Wang, Yuhan Liu, Zixin Yao, Yue Wu, Xun Jiang, Ling Yang, Mengdi Wang
| Challenge: | EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions, especially for vulnerable human users with psychological disorders. |
| Approach: | EmoAgent is a multi-agent AI framework designed to evaluate and mitigate mental health hazards in human-AI interactions. |
| Outcome: | EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions. |
SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves training efficiency on deduplicated datasets and improves downstream accuracy by 1.77%. |
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)
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Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. |
| Approach: | They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. |
Safeguarding LLM Fine-tuning via Push-Pull Distributional Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety defenses for large language models fail to explicitly repel harmful patterns . Optimal transport (SOT) allows for safe fine-tuning without sacrificing safety . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes safe fine-tuning from instance-level filtering challenge to distribution-level alignment task grounded in Optimal Transport. |
| Outcome: | a new framework improves safety of large language models while maintaining competitive performance . the proposed framework reduces the risk of errors and improves model performance compared to baselines . |
Making Flexible Use of Subtasks: A Multiplex Interaction Network for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies aim to integrate multiple sub-tasks into a unified ABSA model but suffer from major disadvantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to make use of sub-tasks for a unified ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can work well when some sub-tasks are absent, and the interactive relations among subtasks not adequate. |
QDTSynth: Quality-Driven Formal Theorem Synthesis for Enhancing Proving Performance of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing formal languages such as Lean, Coq and Metamath are proving to be useful in formal theorem proving . however, there is a scarcity of high-quality supervised fine-tuning data for formal proofs . |
| Approach: | They propose a Q**uality-**D**riven **T**heorem **S**ynthesis method in Lean4 . they propose diversity screening and the self-assessment method to select theoremas that exhibit diversity and high quality from the initial synthetic statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance of open-source LLMs in theorem proving tasks. |
SAME: Signer-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Test-Time Adaptation in Sign Language Translation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning are limited due to labeled data . existing methods require long adaptation times and batch statistics are unavailable in streaming settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play, signer-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) TTA architecture for SLT . they use a combination of lightweight MoE modules and unsupervised regularizers to decouple domain shift . |
| Outcome: | The proposed test-time adaptation outperforms existing TTA methods in sign language translation . the proposed architecture can be used in real-world deployments without labeling . |
Taming Text-to-Image Synthesis for Novices: User-centric Prompt Generation via Multi-turn Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Justin Li, Jian Gao, Zhang Li, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for text-to-image synthesis are sensitive on textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasizes user experience for novice users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emphasizes user experience for novice users . it improves user-centricity score while maintaining a competitive quality of synthesized images. |
Exploring Layer-wise Information Effectiveness for Post-Training Quantization in Small Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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He Xiao, Qingyao Yang, Dirui Xie, Wendong XU, Zunhai Su, Runming Yang, Haobo Liu, Wenyong Zhou, Zhengwu Liu, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Large language models with billions of parameters are often over-provisioned . smaller models exhibit lower robustness under extreme low-bit quantization . |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-native, metric-driven post-training quantization framework that keeps uniform bit-width within each layer while mixing precision across layers. |
| Outcome: | LieQ reduces large accuracy gap observed for large language models with billions of parameters while preserving standard multiplication kernels. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec) do not represent collaborative information in a text-like format, which may not align optimally with LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMRec method that integrates collaborative information through text-like encoding. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that BinLLM integrates collaborative information better with LLMs. |
WISCA: A Lightweight Model Transition Method to Improve LLM Training via Weight Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Zhidong Yang, Pingwei Sun, Feiye Huo, Jiayu Qin, Xiangyu Zhang, Maoxin He, Guangming Tan, Weile Jia, Xunliang Cai, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in training optimization for Transformer-based large language models lack systematic optimization of weight patterns during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Weight Scaling method that rescales weights while preserving model outputs to improve model training efficiency and model quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves convergence quality and loss reduction in LLMs with Grouped Query Attention architectures and LoRA fine-tuning tasks. |
Long Context is Not Long at All: A Prospector of Long-Dependency Data for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) however, training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient since some samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a data mining framework ProLong that assigns each training sample with a long dependency score and ranks and filters them according to their results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can rank and filter training samples that exhibit more powerful long-context modeling abilities. |
Widget Captioning: Generating Natural Language Description for Mobile User Interface Elements (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for examining and fixing missing captions are lacking in mobile UIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for automatically generating language descriptions for UI elements from multimodal input including both the image and structural representations of user interfaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can generate captions from image and structural representations of UI elements. |
DenseSSM: State Space Models with Dense Hidden Connection for Efficient Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face excessive computational and memory requirements due to the commonly used Transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the flow of hidden information between layers in large language models by selectively integrating shallow-layer hidden states into deeper layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains parallelizability and inference efficiency of SSMs while significantly boosting performance on public benchmarks. |
DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-based metrics are limited by their reliance on human input. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt some reference-based metrics to assess system summary against human-written references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms reference-based metrics on two datasets and is comparable to reference-free metrics. |
SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog understanding only consider self-augmented dialogs as positive samples and treat all other dialogs like negative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured pre-trained conversation model which learns dialog representations from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised contrastive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on the DialoGLUE benchmark. |
Customizing In-context Learning for Dynamic Interest Adaption in LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems face challenges to adapt to dynamic user interests without any model-level updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes recommendation-oriented in-context learning by structuring recent user interactions and current inputs into ICL formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts to dynamic user interests without model updates without any model updates and is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecICL-8003. |
Mixup Decoding for Diverse Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating multiple translations for source and target languages neglect the one-to-many mapping between the source and the target languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate different translations for the input sentence by linearly interpolating it with different sentence pairs sampled from the training corpus during decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WMT’16 en-ro, WMT'14 en de, and WMT ‘17 zh-en show that the proposed method outperforms all previous diverse machine translation methods. |
Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems (2021.naacl-industry)
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Tong Wang, Jiangning Chen, Mohsen Malmir, Shuyan Dong, Xin He, Han Wang, Chengwei Su, Yue Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding component makes the interpretation decision before the mentioned entities are resolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking to learn model weights . they propose a score distribution matching method to ensure the models are calibrated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model on multiple domain evaluations. |
Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) focus on analyzing subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service, but they are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to track customer satisfaction in chatbots using a dialogue-level classification module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and shows that it significantly outperformed multiple baselines. |
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. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models lack topologyaware task scheduling mechanisms and model parallelization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-aware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters . they propose heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces job completion time by 1.2-1.3 and improves throughput by 1.12-1.25 . it also reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90 on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems. |
New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Shiyao Cui, QingLin Zhang, Di Wang, Yida Lu, Zhexin Zhang, Jinhua Gao, Jinglin Yang, Min He, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Neologisms can foster new linguistic consensus by stabilizing shared meanings and usage in common communicative norms. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms . they propose 'SeTox' framework that integrates real-time web context for naeologim detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large-scale models in detecting neologism toxicity. |
Teaching Embodied Reinforcement Learning Agents: Informativeness and Diversity of Language Use (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied agents to learn and perform tasks use low-level instructions, which may not reflect natural human communication. |
| Approach: | They propose to use different types of language inputs to facilitate reinforcement learning (RL) embodied agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that agents trained with diverse and informative language can achieve enhanced generalization and fast adaptation to new tasks in an open world. |
Exploring Layer Activation Dynamic of CoT via Knowledge Probe (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought reasoning has emerged as a crucial paradigm for multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage probing framework that enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution. |
What Makes an Ideal Quote? Recommending “Unexpected yet Rational” Quotations via Novelty (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior systems focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that maps quotations and contexts into deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can recommend quotations that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. |
SAS: Dialogue State Tracking via Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with excessive information are inefficient and costly . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a Dialogue State Tracker with Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing to reduce redundant information’s interference and improve long dialogue context tracking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing models on the MultiWOZ dataset. |
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new problem of grounding natural language instructions to mobile UI actions is emerging . we use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instruction . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PixelHelp. |
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Xu, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Pengcheng He, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale datasets for query-focused summarization hinders model development . lack of data limits the ability of QFS models to train robust neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation using a pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks. |
Learning to Correct Noisy Labels for Fine-Grained Entity Typing via Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that noise correction in fine-grained entity typing improves quality of training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages multiple prediction results to correct noisy labels . they integrate prediction results and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves quality of training samples annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing. |
SAIR-Comb : A Structure-Aware Iterative Refinement Framework for Combinatorics Autoformalization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed advances in mathematical reasoning, propelling the development of automated theorem proving (ATP). |
| Approach: | They propose a Structure-Aware Iterative Refinement framework for Combinatorics powered by Lean 4 and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves strong performance on the specialized CombiBench while remaining highly competitive on general-domain benchmarks. |
HeteroSpec: Leveraging Contextual Heterogeneity for Efficient Speculative Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive decoding limits the inference throughput of Large Language Models due to its sequential dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates verification effort in proportion to candidate uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | Speculative decoding achieves an average speedup over state-of-the-art methods . a small subset of high-confidence predictions accounts for most successful verifications . |
LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jian Gao, Richeng Xuan, Zhaolu Kang, Dingshi Liao, Wenxin Huang, Zongmou Huang, Yangdi Xu, Bowen Qin, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, null Changjinli, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing SEA-focused benchmarks miss Lao-specific cultural grounding and linguistic properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for assessing large language models in Lao . they use open-source and held-out subsets to evaluate languages with a hybrid pipeline . |
| Outcome: | LaoBench is the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. |
DiffER: Diffusion Entity-Relation Modeling for Reversal Curse in Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models exhibit unidirectional behavior when processing bidirectional relationships . authors propose a solution to alleviate the reversal curse in Diffusion LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that addresses the "reversal curse" of bidirectional behavior in large language models . they propose 'entity-aware training' and balanced data construction to alleviate asymmetry and missing relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates the "reversal curse" in Diffusion LLMs . the proposed model employs whole-entity masking to mitigate entity fragmentation . |
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Sunbowen Lee, Junting Zhou, Chang Ao, Kaige Li, Xeron Du, Sirui He, Haihong Wu, Tianci Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yitao Liang, Zhoufutu Wen, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed the robustness degra-dation caused by data distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation . they aim to identify identity cognition contradictions and analyse multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information; (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Efficiently Editing Mixture-of-Experts Models with Compressed Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts models allow for efficient scaling of large language models . fewer experts reduce computational costs, while more experts improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose to activate only a subset of experts during training and inference . they propose compressed experts that preserve the most important experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves the most important experts while replacing other auxiliary activated experts with compressed experts. |
Model-based Large Language Model Customization as Service (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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 . |
Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024.emnlp-main)
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Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Yan Wang, Rui Wang, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Modern large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but struggle on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that encourages divergent thinking in LLMs . they propose to break debate and use a judge to obtain a final solution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework encourages divergent thinking in large language models . it is able to generate novel thoughts even if initial stance is incorrect . |
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian
| Challenge: | APEX optimizes for text-to-image generation by combining learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that stabilizes heterogeneous rewards and dynamically schedules objectives . they propose a method that achieves better Pareto trade-offs across four heterogenous objectives based on P3 Adaptive Priorities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves better pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy. |
Towards Understanding the Fragility of Multilingual LLMs against Fine-Tuning Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have sparked concerns about their safety. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify safety-related information in the model parameter space . they propose to use a few adversarially chosen examples to fine-tune LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can break safety alignment in multilingual LLMs using a few examples . it also shows that the proposed method jailbreaks LLM models adapted to new languages . |
M2RC-EVAL: Massively Multilingual Repository-level Code Completion Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaheng Liu, Ken Deng, Congnan Liu, Jian Yang, Shukai Liu, He Zhu, Peng Zhao, Linzheng Chai, Yanan Wu, JinKe JinKe, Ge Zhang, Zekun Moore Wang, Guoan Zhang, Yingshui Tan, Bangyu Xiang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing repository-level code completion benchmarks focus on a limited number of languages . existing benchmarks report overall average scores of different languages ignoring fine-grained abilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use repository-level code completion benchmarks to evaluate general code intelligence abilities across languages for existing code Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks improve the code completion abilities of existing LLMs by using two types of annotations on the parsed syntax tree. |
Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Han, Yaochen Xie, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sreyashi Nag, William Headden, Yang Li, Chen Luo, Shuiwang Ji, Qi He, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, however, they still face challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct explicit graphs from context and leverage them to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks. |
Watermarking with Low-Entropy POS-Guided Token Partitioning and Z-Score-Driven Dynamic Bias for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking methods reduce the fidelity of semantics in LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-entropy token partitioning mechanism and z-score-driven dynamic bias mechanism to enhance semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves semantic fidelity and robustness against bias sparsity attacks. |
Rethinking Word-level Adversarial Attack: The Trade-off between Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Imperceptibility (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models have demonstrated impressive performance but remain vulnerable to word-level adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose two standardized search spaces to address the problem of word-level adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed search spaces improve performance and trade-offs in different scenarios. |
Label-Enhanced Hierarchical Contextualized Representation for Sequential Metaphor Identification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to identify metaphors ignore extra information from data, such as contextual information and broader discourse information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model augmented with hierarchical contextualized representation to extract more information from both sentence-level and discourse-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two tasks using a VUA dataset. |
MGCL: Multi-Granularity Clue Learning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction via Cross-Grained Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods often rely on coarse-grained clause-level annotations, which overlook valuable fine-grain clues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures fine-grained clues from a weakly-supervised perspective efficiently by using a teacher model to give sub-clause clues without needing fine-grain annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering improved interpretability. |
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. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
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Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation. |
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yue Wang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao, Xin He, Qu Yang, Qingxuan Jiang, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization. |
Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Cross-Modal Graph Convolutional Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multimodal sarcasm detection using textual and visual information have been limited to text-only approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a cross-modal graph for each multi-modal instance to explicitly draw the ironic relations between textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal sarcasm detection. |
How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Guhao Feng, Kai Yang, Yuntian Gu, Xinyue Ai, Shengjie Luo, Jiacheng Sun, Di He, Zhenguo Li, Liwei Wang
| Challenge: | Despite the success of transformer-based large language models, understanding and enhancing their mathematical capabilities remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use numerical precision as a key factor that influences LLMs' effectiveness in arithmetical tasks to determine their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better in arithmetic tasks than transformer-based models with standard numerical precision. |
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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Jie He, Jennifer Neville, Mengting Wan, Longqi Yang, Hui Liu, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jeff Z. Pan, Pei Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o. |
Adaptive Learning of Local Semantic and Global Structure Representations for Text Classification (C18-1)
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Jianyu Zhao, Zhiqiang Zhan, Qichuan Yang, Yang Zhang, Changjian Hu, Zhensheng Li, Liuxin Zhang, Zhiqiang He
| Challenge: | Existing representation models for text classification learn little structure information or rely on pre-defined structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a sandwich neural network to learn local semantic and global structure representations without relying on parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves competitive performance on several text classification tasks. |
ModularMoE: Fast LLM Customization with Parameter-Sharing Mixture-of-Experts for Low-Resource Settings (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaxing Liu, Qi Qi, Haifeng Sun, Dunjun Li, Zirui Zhuang, Bo He, Xiang Yang, Cong Liu, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models impose significant computational and storage burdens on personal devices . existing customization approaches incur excessive computational costs or lead to suboptimal performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that converts pre-trained LLMs into parameter-sharing MoE models for lightweight deployment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework outperforms state-of-the-art training frameworks at the same sparsity level while delivering up to 2.71 inference speedup. |