Papers by Yang Sun
ThinkPersona: Thinking with Persona Graphs for Faithful Individualized Role-Playing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly utilized as role-playing agents to simulate personas in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing agent trained to explicitly ground responses in individual identity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can generate persona-consistent responses in long-context dialogues while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhao, Pingjie Wang, Liudan Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Ya Zhang, Kun Sun, Xin Sun, Xin Zhou, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds. |
Exploiting Global and Local Hierarchies for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, which makes them hard to exploit hierarchical information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification by encoding label hierarchy as a static hierarchical structure containing all labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
PEARL: Prompting Large Language Models to Plan and Execute Actions Over Long Documents (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using chain-of-thought prompting, large language models perform better on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompting framework that decomposes a question into a sequence of actions and executes them over the document to obtain the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting on a QuALITY dataset . it proposes a plan based on actions mined from a training set and executes it step by step . |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
FuxiTranyu: A Multilingual Large Language Model Trained with Balanced Data (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Haoran Sun, Renren Jin, Shaoyang Xu, Leiyu Pan, null Supryadi, Menglong Cui, Jiangcun Du, Yikun Lei, Lei Yang, Ling Shi, Juesi Xiao, Shaolin Zhu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit significant performance discrepancies between high- and low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They present an open-source multilingual LLM with 8 billion parameters and a multilingual instruction dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent multilingual representations across languages. |
OCP: Outlier-Centric Probing for Dynamic Structured Pruning of LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing structured pruning methods fail to identify outlier-triggering tokens and uniform layer-wise sparsity misaligns with heterogeneous outlier distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prioritizes capturing outlier-triggering tokens rather than reconstructing full hidden distributions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaMA2, LLama3 and OPT show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves 25% perplexity reduction at 1.6 speedup. |
Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-acl)
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Ganesh Jawahar, Haichuan Yang, Yunyang Xiong, Zechun Liu, Dilin Wang, Fei Sun, Meng Li, Aasish Pappu, Barlas Oguz, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) uses weight-sharing supernets to generate diverse subnetworks without retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a weight-sharing supernet that leverages mixture-of-experts to enhance supernet model expressiveness with minimal training overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in NAS for fast machine translation models, surpassing NAS-BERT and AutoDistil across various model sizes. |
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors. |
Failures are Treasures: Constructing a Pedagogical Bridge for Agentic Strategy Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on imitating successful trajectories, whereas small language models are fragile and often collapsing after encountering errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pedagogical Bridge for Reflective Insight and Distillation of Guiding Errors that combines reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action to enable agents to diagnose and correct critical errors while abstracting transferable strategies from contrastive student–teacher trajectories. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model significantly elevates performance in large language models (SLMs) . |
PunMemeCN: A Benchmark to Explore Vision-Language Models’ Understanding of Chinese Pun Memes (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pun memes combine wordplay with visual elements to create humor, irony, or other rhetorical effects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess Chinese pun memes' processing capabilities across three progressive tasks: pun meme detection, sentiment analysis, and chat-driven meme response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect pun memes, analyze sentiments, and respond to chats, while ignoring homophone wordplay. |
WhitenedCSE: Whitening-based Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on seven semantic textual similarity tasks show our method achieves consistent improvement over the contrastive learning baseline and sets new states of the art. |
| Approach: | They propose a whitening-based contrastive learning method for sentence embedding learning which combines contrastive and shuffled group whitening. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better alignment and uniformity on seven semantic textual similarity tasks. |
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. |
Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)
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Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Defu Cao, Mingliang Zhang1, Yunhai Tong, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Ruofei Zhang, Hao Sun, Wei Shen
| Challenge: | Existing works of knowledge infusion depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale retraining when new knowledge is considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism and integrates it into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on academic datasets and industry-scale ad relevance applications. |
Comprehensive and Efficient Distillation for Lightweight Sentiment Analysis Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to develop lightweight and practical sentiment analysis models are limited by manual instruction and large-scale user texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for sentiment analysis that uses attribute-based instruction construction and difficulty-based data filtering to distill knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in data efficiency and performance. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
SPORTSINTERVIEW: A Large-Scale Sports Interview Benchmark for Entity-centric Dialogues (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge grounded dialogue datasets only contain external knowledge from one dimension, which limits the diversity of knowledge sources and may contain unwanted bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two types of external knowledge sources as knowledge grounding in an interview dataset to model human dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 150K interviews and 34K interviewees . it is larger in size and has more than one dimension of external knowledge linking . however, the performance of the proposed models is far from humans . |
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity (2026.findings-acl)
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Zheyuan Yang, Liqiang Shang, Junjie Chen, Xun Yang, Chenglong Xu, Bo Yuan, Chenyuan Jiao, Yaoru Sun, Yilun Zhao
| Challenge: | TableVista evaluates multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity . current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combined with visually integrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on visual and structural complexity. |
Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Ruohong Zhang, Bowen Zhang, Yanghao Li, Haotian Zhang, Zhiqing Sun, Zhe Gan, Yinfei Yang, Ruoming Pang, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Current training recipes often rely on datasets dominated by short annotations with limited rationales, hindering the models' ability to generalize to tasks requiring comprehensive reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage post-training strategy that augments short answers with CoT reasoning generated by GPT-4o, enhancing the VLM's CoT capabilities through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enhances the model's CoT capabilities through fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Aegis:An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Aegis is an advanced LLM-based multi-agent for intelligent functional safety engineering that can perform all phases of a vehicle's lifecycle, including design, development, production, operation, and decommissioning. |
| Approach: | They introduce Aegis: An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can perform Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), document Functional Safety Requirements (FSR), and plan test cases for Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems. |
Learning Sentiment Memories for Sentiment Modification without Parallel Data (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment modification generate input-irrelevant texts due to lack of parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically extracts appropriate sentiment information from learned sentiment memories according to the specific context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the content preservation degree and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. |
GuideBench: Benchmarking Domain-Oriented Guideline Following for LLM Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed as autonomous agents capable of following user instructions and making decisions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow domain-oriented guidelines . they evaluate Lms on three critical aspects: adherence to diverse rules, robustness to rule updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs on three critical aspects: adherence to diverse rules, robustness to rule updates, and alignment with human preferences. |
Chart-MRAG: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation on Chart-based Documents (2026.acl-long)
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null Ymyang, Jiang Zhong, Li Jin, Xiao Sun, Jingwang Huang, null Gaojinpeng, Qing Liu, Yang Bai, Jingyuan Zhang, Rui Jiang, Qin Lei, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. |
Cross-Modal Commentator: Automatic Machine Commenting Based on Cross-Modal Information (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on commenting based on textual content is focused on other modalities, such as graphics and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to integrate multiple modalities into automatic commenting . they construct a large-scale dataset and propose 'co-attention' model to capture dependency between textual and visual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance than baselines. |
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. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
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. |
ShifCon: Enhancing Non-Dominant Language Capabilities with a Shift-based Multilingual Contrastive Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Chenming Shang, Sizhe Wang, Dongdong Zhang, Yiyao Yu, Feng Yao, Renliang Sun, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experiments show that ShifCon significantly enhances the performance of non-dominant languages due to the imbalance in training data across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shift-based multilingual Contrastive framework that aligns the internal forward process of other languages toward that of the dominant one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance of non-dominant languages, particularly for low-resource ones. |
Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets. |
SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results, a study finds . existing large language models lack prior knowledge of the content of superior legal articles . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese superior legal article retrieval dataset to find relevant articles with higher legal effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results. |
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning (2026.acl-long)
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Junjie Wang, Zequn Xie, Dan Yang, Jie Feng, Yue Shen, Duolin Sun, Meixiu Long, Yihan Jiao, Zhehao Tan, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-call rounds by 20% while improving accuracy and efficiency while maintaining the same level of performance as existing models. |
Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations between entities in a document. |
| Approach: | They propose a Document-level distant relation extraction framework with unreliable pseudo labels to denoise DS data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on two public datasets. |
OD-RTE: A One-Stage Object Detection Framework for Relational Triple Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for relational triple extraction are underutilizing regional information of triple. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stage Object Detection framework for Relational Triple Extraction . framework uses vertices-based bounding box detection and global relational triple region detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could extract all types of triples on two widely used datasets. |
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Brian S. Lin, Jiaxin Yuan, Zihan Zhou, Shouli Wang, Shuo Wang, Cunliang Kong, Qi Shi, Yuxuan Li, Liner Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings. |
MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved generation and reasoning capabilities compared to traditional BERT-sized models due to massive number of parameters and extensive pre-training on vast textual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of large language models . they propose to fine-tune only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter improves performance on four biomedical tasks without requiring computational resources or sharing data with third parties. |
It’s Not Bragging If You Can Back It Up: Can LLMs Understand Braggings? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Bragging is a pervasive social-linguistic phenomenon that reflects complex human interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use bragging recognition, bragging explanation, and bragging generation tasks to examine bragging in large language models (LLMs) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can identify bragging intent, social appropriateness, and account for context sensitivity and provide new insights into how LLMs process bragging. |
MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Fanyi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Haoyu Liu, Xixin Cao, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Instruction tuning has enabled large language models to achieve remarkable performance, yet its success heavily depends on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual alignment framework which enforces coherence between instructions and responses through mutual constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes well across model architectures and sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen models across diverse benchmarks. |
Large Language Model-Enhanced Multi-Armed Bandits (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used to sequential decision-making tasks like multi-armed bandits where an LLM is tasked with selecting arms in each iteration is often suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine MAB and LLMs to leverage the in-context learning capability of LLM for reward prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms LLM-based direct arm selection on synthetic tasks where only preference feedback between arm pairs is available. |
ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Puns add the challenge of fusing commonsense and world knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment existing datasets with detailed crowdsourced annotations of puns, keywords and fine-grained funniness ratings to challenge current models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks include explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation to challenge state-of-the-art models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method for training LLMs on long sequences with high throughput and memory efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint compared to baseline methods . it trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs . |
Enhancing Topic-to-Essay Generation with External Commonsense Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for topic-to-essay generation are insufficient for generating novel, diverse, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with a set of topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate commonsense from external knowledge base into the generator through dynamic memory mechanism and adversarial training to further improve topic-consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is more novel, diverse, and topic-consistent than existing methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluation. |
FPE2M2: Approaching Lossless and Efficient Quantization with Native Floating Point (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Yi, Jianwei Zhang, Zhiying Xu, Xinlong Yang, Yang Zhou, Minmin Sun, Zengke Liu, Tong Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Auto-regressive decoding is a memory-bound job, meaning decoding performance is limited by the bandwidth rather than the computational capabilities of the GPU. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that supports lossless weight-only quantization inference and validate it on Qwen and LLaMA Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest efficiency with lossless accuracy on Qwen and LLaMA Models across various modalities. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement (2025.coling-main)
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Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Yi Fung, Hou Pong Chan, Kevin Small, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on enhancing the retrieval stage and optimizing the representation of the database. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
ConKI: Contrastive Knowledge Injection for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Yakun Yu, Mingjun Zhao, Shi-ang Qi, Feiran Sun, Baoxun Wang, Weidong Guo, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Yang, Di Niu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis focus on general knowledge, which is inadequate to identify specific sentiments across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on three popular benchmarks on multimodal sentiment analysis metrics. |
Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory (2025.acl-long)
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Mingda Chen, Yang Li, Karthik Padthe, Rulin Shao, Alicia Yi Sun, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh, Wen-tau Yih
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate factually inaccurate content, a problem known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a working memory that receives feedback from external resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four fact-seeking datasets and increases the factuality metric by 2 to 6 points absolute. |
Nearest Neighbor Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) is a state-of-the-art machine translation technique . however, it requires conducting kNN searches for each decoding step, which increases the cost of decoding . |
| Approach: | They propose to move the time-consuming kNN search forward to the preprocessing phase and introduce k Nearest Neighbor Knowledge Distillation (kNN-KD) that trains the base NMT model to directly learn the knowledge of kN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over the state-of-the-art model while maintaining the same training and decoding speed as the standard model. |
Joint Entity and Relation Extraction for Legal Documents with Legal Feature Enhancement (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction are based on pipelining to extract entities from unstructured judgment documents . a large number of judgment documents are released on China Judgments Online . |
| Approach: | They propose a legal triplet extraction system for drug-related criminal judgment documents . they annotate a dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction in Chinese legal domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entities and semantic relations jointly and benefits from the proposed legal lexicon feature and multi-task learning framework. |
The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite near-perfect results, effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose QAEdit and WILD to better reflect real-world use of model editing . they propose a benchmark aligned with widely used question answering datasets and a task-agnostic evaluation framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed QAEdit benchmark and WILD evaluation framework show that current models perform worse than previously reported. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
Improving Back-Translation with Uncertainty-based Confidence Estimation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of low-resource neural machine translation, there is a data scarcity problem in many languages . large-scale, high-quality, and widecoverage bilingual corpora do not exist for most language pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify confidence of NMT models based on model uncertainty . they propose to use uncertainty-based confidence measures to improve back-translation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks. |
ERRV: Eliciting Efficient Reasoning through Reasoning Vectors for Policy Optimization in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve reasoning efficiency of large language models focus on modifying the reinforcement learning reward, such as adding length penalties. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that elicits efficient reasoning through reasoning vectors and a framework that allows the model to generate high-quality responses during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length by 30% while maintaining stability, while retaining high accuracy. |
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . they decompose a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . it decomposes a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . the framework is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompts . |
Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Low-Resource Stance Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Stance Detection Tasks require background knowledge especially when there is no explicit target mentioned in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a masked language prompt joint contrastive learning approach to stimulate the knowledge inherit from pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective in stance detection on three benchmarks. |
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. |
A Multi-persona Framework for Argument Quality Assessment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for argument quality assessment do not consider multi-perspective evaluation due to subjective nature of arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-persona framework for argument quality assessment that simulates diverse evaluator perspectives through large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while providing comprehensive multi-perspective rationales on IBM-Rank-30k and IBM-ArgQ-5.3kArgs datasets. |
A Compliance Checking Framework Based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-based compliance checking methods are limited by their flexibility and lack structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based compliance checking framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation that integrates a static layer for storing factual knowledge, a dynamic layer for retrieval and reasoning, and an eventic graph to structurally describe regulatory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art results across various scenarios surpassing baselines. |
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Yujing Zhang, Yilin Xiao, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow- level evaluation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates large language models on financial management workflows . the global financial services market is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for large language models on financial management workflows reveals critical capability gaps . accuracy drops from 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning . the global financial services market reached $25.8 trillion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
Unveiling Internal Reasoning Modes in LLMs: A Deep Dive into Latent Reasoning vs. Factual Shortcuts with Attribute Rate Ratio (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yiran Yang, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Huazheng Wang, Pengfei Ren, Jing Wang, Jianxin Liao
| Challenge: | Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes, but has not investigated how these modes differ during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification metric that compares latent reasoning and factual shortcuts in multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric achieves 90% accuracy on the proposed datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Asking Clarification Questions in Knowledge-Based Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing clarification datasets with limited annotated examples do not address ambiguous phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that allows users to ask clarification questions using open-domain examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than strong baselines and provides new challenges. |
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. |
TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.acl-long)
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Yindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Chen Li Yu, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value identification face critical challenges . seller-provided attribute values are often incomplete or inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method that uses taxonomy-aware contrastive learning . they use product profiles and candidate values to encode and retrieve attributes based on similarity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a taxonomy-aware, hard negative sampling and adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. |
Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, from * Equal Contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based multi-agent systems through training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves communication efficiency and task effectiveness on multi-agent tasks with 2.8x performance gain with less than 10% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. |
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. |
Empowering Language Models with Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Language Models lack the power to store all required knowledge, resulting in a lack of ability to infer out-of-context knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Interaction Layer that can be flexibly plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Yang Liu, Yuanhang Zheng, Gang Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Ji Zhang, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) effective neural network methods have been used in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) However, the robustness of the previous neural methods is limited by the large-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised Chinese word segmentation approach with a straightforward and effective architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on 9 different CWS datasets with single criterion training and multiple criteria training and achieves better robustness. |
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate factual consistency in text summarization neglect the intrinsic cause of factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship between source document, generated summary, and the language prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves correlation with human judgments and convenience of usage on three public abstractive text summarization datasets. |
UniKER: A Unified Framework for Combining Embedding and Definite Horn Rule Reasoning for Knowledge Graph Inference (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph inference has been studied extensively due to its wide applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that restricts logical rules to be definite Horn rules and can exploit the knowledge in logical rule-based reasoning and KGE in an extremely efficient way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can exploit the knowledge in logical rules and improve KGE in an extremely efficient way. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
IEvoAgent: Evolving Conversational Agent based on User Implicit Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize conversational agents often rely on explicit preference pairs and expert evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent framework that leverages the structured dependency between agent responses and user reactions to extract implicit feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on MT-Bench-101, WildBench, and FB-Bech, and shows that mining implicit feedback supports better multi-turn alignment under evolving user preferences. |
PITA: Prompting Task Interaction for Argumentation Mining (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation mining (AM) aims to detect arguments and their inherent relations from textual compositions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to model the inter-relationships among three subtasks within a generative framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks. |
Judge as A Judge: Improving the Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Judge-Consistency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuliang Liu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Cheng Yang, Zheni Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ge Yu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics cannot fairly evaluate the outputs of RAG models during training and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which prompts LLMs to generate different judgments based on various combinations of judgment dimensions and utilizes the judge-consistency to evaluate these judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate evaluations for RAG models across different RAG model and datasets. |
Exploring Quality and Diversity in Synthetic Data Generation for Argument Mining (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument Mining (AM) is hindered by the scarcity of structure-annotated datasets, which are expensive to create manually. |
| Approach: | They propose to use quality-oriented synthesis and diversity-oriented approach to generate argumentative texts with diverse topics and argument structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves existing models in full-data and low-resource settings. |
Document-Level Relation Extraction via Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced Representation Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level relation extraction methods are sparse in relational entity pairs and the representation of entity pairs is insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced(PAEE) model to solve two challenges . they propose predicting potential relational entity pairs and assembling directional entity pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can obtain state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets . it can predict potential relational entity pairs and assemble directional entity pairs . |
Towards Database-Free Text-to-SQL Evaluation: A Graph-Based Metric for Functional Correctness (2025.coling-main)
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Yi Zhan, Longjie Cui, Han Weng, Guifeng Wang, Yu Tian, Boyi Liu, Yingxiang Yang, Xiaoming Yin, Jiajun Xie, Yang Sun
| Challenge: | Existing metrics for evaluating functional correctness of SQL queries are prone to false positives due to inadequately prepared test databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based metric that uses a relational operator tree to extract rich semantic information from the logical execution plan of SQL queries and embed it into a diagram. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the need for extensive test database preparation and performs graph matching on unseen SQL queries. |
Reducing Word Omission Errors in Neural Machine Translation: A Contrastive Learning Approach (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reducing word omission errors in neural machine translation are prone to omit essential words on the source side. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning approach to reduce word omission errors in NMT by omitting words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better translation performance than baseline methods on Chinese-to-English, German-to English, and Russian-toEnglish translation tasks. |
HIRAG: Hierarchical-Thought Instruction-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-depth research on the specific capabilities needed by the RAG generation model is lacking, leading to inconsistent document quality and retrieval system imperfections. |
| Approach: | They propose that RAG models should possess three progressively hierarchical abilities: (1) Filtering: the ability to select relevant information; (2) Combination: the capability to combine semantic information across paragraphs; (3) RAG-specific reasoning: the capacity to further process external knowledge using internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the model’s open-book examination capability on datasets such as RGB, PopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and PubmedQA. |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information from evidence are unable to grasp relational and logical information among the evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based evidence aggregating and reasoning framework to integrate evidence from multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on a large-scale benchmark dataset. |
Think Better, Not Longer: Token-Level Marginal Utility for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate explicit Chain-of-Thought rationales, but often suffer from "overthinking". |
| Approach: | They propose a unified training framework to synthesize concise reasoning chains by identifying tokens that reduce the model’s likelihood of the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on deepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen backbones show that MUTO yields better efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier. |
APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation (2026.acl-long)
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Pengyun Zhu, Qiheng Sun, Long Wen, Yanbo Wang, Yang Cao, Junxu Liu, Deyi Xiong, Jinfei Liu, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
| Challenge: | a lack of high-quality English privacy policy corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability is limiting translation of privacy policies . 139 privacy policies are often considered "incomprehensible" due to technical jargon, legal language, and convoluted grammatical structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality English privacy policy corpus annotated by domain experts . they propose APPSI-139 to summarize and interpret privacy policies in English . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large language models in terms of readability and accuracy. |
VQA-Augmented Machine Translation with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal machine translation methods often extract visual features using pre-trained models while learning text features from scratch, leading to representation imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal VQA-augmented multimodal machine translation method . it aligns image-source text pairs and image-question text pairs through dual-text contrastive learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics. |
RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Xiang, Tianyi Tang, Yang Su, Bowen Yu, An Yang, Fei Huang, Yichang Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on character-centric approach and fail to reflect real-world applications. |
| Approach: | RMTBench is a user-centric bilingual role-playing benchmark featuring 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
| Outcome: | RMTBench features 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
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. |
Reasoning-Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models for Short Video Content Governance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Zixuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hongwei Wang, Baoyu Jing, Xiang Shen, Xin Dong, Zhuolin Hao, Hongyu Xiong, Yang Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying inappropriate content require extensive human-labeled data and lack cross-issue generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) pretraining paradigm for unified inappropriate content detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the MLLM's performance in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings and shows strong generalization capabilities to emergent, previously unseen issues. |
Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level attack models are far from perfect because of unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial adversarialist model that incorporates word substitution and particle swarm optimization to solve two problems separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves much higher success rates and crafts more high-quality adversarial examples as compared to baseline methods. |
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Yiran Yang, Li Jin, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiao Li, Linhao Zhang, Jintao Liu, Guo Zhi
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MMDialog is a dataset of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a curated set of 1.08 million dialogues with 1.53 million unique images to generalize the open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict responses to multi-modal content with state-of-the-art techniques and measure their performance. |
CRASpell: A Contextual Typo Robust Approach to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research on Chinese spelling correction methods has poor performance on multi-typo texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Bert-based Chinese spelling correction models to overcome these limitations by constructing a noisy context for each training sample and a copy mechanism to encourage the model to choose the input character when the miscorrected and input character are both valid. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on widely used benchmarks and achieves a remarkable gain. |
Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models’ Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores (2026.acl-long)
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Congren Dai, Yue Yang, Krinos Li, Huichi Zhou, Shijie Liang, Zhang Bo, Enyang Liu, Ge Jin, Hongran An, Haosen Zhang, Peiyuan Jing, KinHei Lee, Zhenxuan Zhang, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for musical score understanding are narrow in scope, focusing on isolated fragments, short excerpts, or multiple-choice formulations, rather than supporting holistic reasoning over entire scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The musical score understanding benchmark contains 1,800 question-answer pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others. |
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. |
Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zhiyuan Liu, Minghe Yu, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines. |
Iterative Self-Tuning LLMs for Enhanced Jailbreaking Capabilities (2025.naacl-long)
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Chung-En Sun, Xiaodong Liu, Weiwei Yang, Tsui-Wei Weng, Hao Cheng, Aidan San, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. |
| Outcome: | ADV-LLM significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100% ASR on various open-source LLMs. |
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weize Chen, Chenfei Yuan, Jiarui Yuan, Yusheng Su, Chen Qian, Cheng Yang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, but its utility in LLMs has not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | They propose to allow LLMs to choose the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating, and to automate the selection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed format improves reasoning efficiency and reduces token usage while maintaining communicative effectiveness. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
TofuEval: Evaluating Hallucinations of LLMs on Topic-Focused Dialogue Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
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Liyan Tang, Igor Shalyminov, Amy Wong, Jon Burnsky, Jake Vincent, Yu’an Yang, Siffi Singh, Song Feng, Hwanjun Song, Hang Su, Lijia Sun, Yi Zhang, Saab Mansour, Kathleen McKeown
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors in the dialogue domain, regardless of the model’s size. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate topic-focused dialogue summarization by using large language models (LLMs) they use human annotations to evaluate factual consistency and explain factually inconsistent sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark on topic-focused dialogue summarization shows that existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors regardless of the model’s size. |
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 . |
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. |
Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Distributed LLMs avoid raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributed inference framework that transmits intermediate hidden states to avoid sending raw inputs by exposing sensitive user attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves Top-1 accuracy of 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR. |
CogEvolve: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Relational Reasoning in Semantic Extension (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a gap exists between human embodied logic and machine statistical learning . authors: models internalize statistical patterns or mimic static recognition . |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive linguistic benchmark to test whether large language models internalize statistical logic or not . they find that models function as "Super-Associators" expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails at causal reasoning and has a high-fidelity concept representation but lacks transformational operators essential for true relational understanding. |
Argument Pair Extraction with Mutual Guidance and Inter-sentence Relation Graph (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on argumentation mining focus on monological argumentation and dialogical argumentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual guidance framework that could guide arguments in one passage . they propose an inter-sentence relation graph to effectively model the inter-relations between two sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art model. |
Human-in-the-loop Robotic Grasping Using BERT Scene Representation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes are expensive and lack structure information. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes . they substitute scene-graph representation with a text representation of the scene using BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms object-agnostic and scene-graph based methods on robots and physical robots. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to jailbreak rely on fixed template design and a single programming language . however, existing approaches do not consider language diversity or adaptive template evolution . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured jailbreak framework that explores and optimizes multi-language code templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing jailbreak baselines and produces higher harmful outputs than baseline methods. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
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Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
LightVLP: A Lightweight Vision-Language Pre-training via Gated Interactive Masked AutoEncoders (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language pre-training models use multi-modal encoders to encode image and text, causing noisy training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework with two autoencoders for efficient training . they propose masked tokens and a gated interaction mechanism to cope with noise . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 2.2% R@1 gains on COCO Text Retrieval and 1.1% on refCOCO+ on six datasets. |
AttnPO: Attention-Guided Process Supervision for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Shuaiyi Nie, null Dingsiyu, Wenyuan Zhang, Linhao Yu, Tianmeng Yang, Yao Chen, Weichong Yin, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing trajectory-level length penalties fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they treat all reasoning steps uniformly and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length while improving performance across 9 benchmarks. |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yang Li, Yajiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Maodi Hu, Mengting Zhang, Xi Sun, Hua Yue, Zhixiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is a key bottleneck for turning unstructured papers into computable knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific information extraction framework that solves a Sudoku problem as a progressive filling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the GPT-4o model on a document-level adjuvant dataset. |
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 . |
How Far Can In-Context Alignment Go? Exploring the State of In-Context Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICA) can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences without requiring parameter adjustments. |
| Approach: | They investigate the effectiveness of each part in enabling ICA to function effectively and examine how variants in these parts impact alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can comprehend human instructions without parameter adjustments. |
STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese hate speech detection lack span-level fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They construct a Span-level target-aware Toxicity Extraction dataset and evaluate existing models for Chinese hateful slang. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset and evaluates the ability of existing models to understand hate semantics. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
MisinfoBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Resilience to Misinformation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess factual accuracy in isolated queries but fail to evaluate LLMs’ resilience to misinformation in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | MisinfoBench is a benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ ability to discern, resist, and reject misinformation. |
| Outcome: | MisinfoBench assesses large language models’ ability to discern, resist, and reject misinformation in interactive settings. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
Agent-GWO: Collaborative Agents for Dynamic Prompt Optimization in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xudong Wang, Chaoning Zhang, Chenghao Li, Shuxu Chen, Qigan Sun, Jiaquan Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Tae-Ho Kim, Jiwei Wei, Malu Zhang, Guoqing Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing automatic prompt optimization methods fail to optimize prompts and decoding hyperparameters within a unified framework to achieve stable global improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic prompt optimization framework for complex reasoning that unifies prompt templates and decodes hyperparameters as inheritable agent configurations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical and hybrid reasoning benchmarks show that Agent-GWO improves accuracy and stability over existing prompt optimization methods. |
Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generative retrieval heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers, thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm that can learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and industrial datasets and can handle new documents. |
MIRTT: Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers for Visual Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing bilinear methods focus on inter-modality information between images and questions . existing models focus on the interaction between images, questions, and images . |
| Approach: | They propose a trilinear interaction framework that incorporates attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modal relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms bilinear models on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperformed baselines on the VQA, TDIUC and GQA datasets. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianshu Yu, Chao Xiang, Mingchuan Yang, Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Cunxiang Wang, Jiale Cheng, Li Zhang, Xinyu Mu, Chuxiong Sun, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
Can Large Language Models Translate Unseen Languages in Underrepresented Scripts? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in machine translation, but struggle with unseen low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate translation for Mongolian and Yi using linguistic resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate Mongolian (in traditional script) and Yi with the help of linguistic resources, but is limited in its ability to handle these languages effectively. |
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained language models on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cloze-driven prompt framework for prompt tuning that implicitly stimulates knowledge from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art for prompt-based fine-tuning on few-shot NLU tasks. |
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning LLMs often spend tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces when solving new problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration and retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
StraGo: Harnessing Strategic Guidance for Prompt Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Bin Zhu, Zineng Zhou, Xiaodi Sun, Sheng Yang, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt optimization often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously successful cases while addressing failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate prompt drifting by integrating in-context learning to formulate specific, actionable strategies for prompt optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates prompt drifting by leveraging insights from both successful and failed cases to identify critical factors for achieving optimization objectives. |
A Re-evaluation of Knowledge Graph Completion Methods (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims at automatically predicting missing links for large-scale knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a protocol to evaluate KGC methods that is robust to handle bias in the model, which can substantially affect the final results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation protocol is robust to handle bias in the model, which can substantially affect the final results. |
Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Adapter (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for federated multilingual neural machine translation (Fed-MNMT) are limited in language resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that keeps PLMs frozen and only transfers lightweight adapter modules between clients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces communication cost by over 98% while achieving similar or even better performance compared to baselines. |
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. |
Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating pun sentences with word senses lack large-scale corpus for supervised learning . a pun is a clever and amusing use of a word with two meanings (word senses) |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation with a generator and a discriminator to distinguish between generated pun sentences and real sentences with specific word senses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network generates sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models. |
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)
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Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan, Jindong Wang, Yuzhuo Bai, Muhua Huang, Yang Ou, Scarlett Li, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Zhicheng Dou, Maosong Sun, James Evans, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values. |
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao, Rosella Galindo Esparza, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-resource questions pose a significant challenge within the field of Question-Answering (QA) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large models' internal knowledge to enhance the quality of augmented data by Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing augmentation strategies on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
End-to-End Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Referring Expression Matching (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training methods take pre-extracted region-based visual features from external object detectors, which limits flexibility and reduces computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training task that predicts which patches contain an object referred to in natural language from the encoded visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and obtains state-of-the-art results on four vision-and-language tasks. |
MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE . BERT is one of the largest models ever in NLP, but suffers from heavy model size and high latency . |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to compress and accelerate the popular BERT model by task-agnostic application. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE . it achieves competitive results on well-known benchmarks . |
Breaking the Boundaries: A Unified Framework for Chinese Named Entity Recognition Across Text and Speech (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are limited by the complexity of the data and the potential connections between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to break the boundaries between different modal NER tasks by using a unified data format for inputs from different modalités. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task breaks the boundaries between different modal NER tasks and is a unified implementation of them. |
Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yusheng Su, Chi-Min Chan, Jiali Cheng, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Shengding Hu, Zonghan Yang, Ning Ding, Xingzhi Sun, Guotong Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can drive large pre-trained language models by training only minimal parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient tuning method that is compatible with a tunable module and uses a random number generator to optimize fewer table parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with a tunable module and tested on 11 NLP tasks. |
Mask-Align: Self-Supervised Neural Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Word alignment is an important task in many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised word alignment model that takes advantage of the full context on the target side. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous unsupervised models and obtains state-of-the-art results on four language pairs. |
A Computational Framework for Slang Generation (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models trained on large text corpora are biased toward formal language and under-represent slang. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that models the speaker’s word choice in slang context by relating the conventional and sexist senses of a word while incorporating syntactic and contextual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art language models and better predicts the historical emergence of slang word usages from 1960s to 2000s. |
Deciphering Stereotypes in Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Weicheng Ma, Henry Scheible, Brian Wang, Goutham Veeramachaneni, Pratim Chowdhary, Alan Sun, Andrew Koulogeorge, Lili Wang, Diyi Yang, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Current approaches for examining stereotypes in PLMs require intricate human knowledge about these stereotypes and entail careful manual curation of examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for examining stereotype-encoding behavior of PLMs using model probing and textual analyses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can debiase PLMs without compromising their language modeling capabilities or performance. |
EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline (2021.naacl-demos)
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Mingyu Derek Ma, Jiao Sun, Mu Yang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Nuan Wen, Shikhar Singh, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Event information is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates state-of-the-art components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be easily adapted to other domains, including biomedical domains. |
VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Multi-modal Models lack a robust visual processing capability that is often masked by evaluation metrics that prioritize final-answer accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer evaluation framework that scrutinizes the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps on state-of-the-art models. |
MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory systems can support long-horizon human-LLM interactions by persisting historical interactions beyond limited context windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments memory systems with a self-evolving meta-memory . meta-meso is iteratively distilling transferable knowledge utilization experiences . results show MetaMem outperforms strong baselines by over 3.6% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by over 3.6% in the long-horizon human-LLM interaction. |
Enhanced Language Representation with Label Knowledge for Span Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract text spans from plain text do not fully exploit label knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to integrate label knowledge into text representations by encoding texts and annotations independently and then integrating label knowledge with an elaborate-designed semantics fusion module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks and reduces training time and inference time by 76% and 77% on average compared with the existing paradigm. |
Learning to Copy for Automatic Post-Editing (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Automatic post-editing (APE) is an important task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly models how to copy words from a machine translation to a correct translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all published methods on the WMT 2016-2017 datasets. |
An Extensible Plug-and-Play Method for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-aspect controllable text generation has attracted increasing attention . but the mutual interference of multiple prefixes limits its extensibility to training-time unseen combinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use trainable gates to normalize the intervention of prefixes to restrain the interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on constraint accuracy, text quality, and extensibility. |
AI-Press: A Multi-Agent News Generating and Feedback Simulation System Powered by Large Language Models (2025.coling-demos)
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Xiawei Liu, Shiyue Yang, Xinnong Zhang, Haoyu Kuang, Libo Sun, Yihang Yang, Siming Chen, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | We introduce AI-Press, an automated news drafting and polishing system based on multi-agent collaboration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. |
| Approach: | They introduce AI-Press, an automated news drafting and polishing system based on multi-agent collaboration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates public responses considering demographic distributions. |
Imagination and Contemplation: A Balanced Framework for Semantic-Augmented Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) is effective in resolving linguistic ambiguities, but visual information often introduces redundancy or noise, potentially impairing translation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-augmented framework that integrates "Imagination" and "Contemplation" they first generate synthetic images from source text and align them with authentic images via an optimal transport loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on translation datasets with visually ambiguous or weakly correlated content. |
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yaming Yang, Huang Hu, Fei Xu, Jessica Zhang, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multimodal dialogue models but neglect generation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialogue response generation task which requires multimodal dialogs containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses. |
EoT: Evolution of Thoughts for Complex Reasoning Tasks (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on ensuring behavior fidelity, factuality or reliability in generated reasoning processes, but they neglect the simultaneous optimization of all three aspects for each thought. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought assessment method that is sensitive to knowledge and LLM behaviors . they use three scorers to evaluate each thought by considering domain context, semantic alignment, and behavior impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms advanced approaches in knowledge-based complex tasks. |
RepSum: Unsupervised Dialogue Summarization based on Replacement Strategy (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn vital information from dialogue context with limited data are limited due to limited words in utterances and huge gap between dialogue and its summary. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised strategy to learn vital information from dialogue context . the proposed model uses a hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a number of datasets. |
Improving Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from AI Feedback (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn sentence embeddings with rich semantics are limited due to the discrete nature of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback to improve contrastive learning of sentence embeddings by combining human feedback and AI feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several semantic textual similarity and transfer learning tasks compared to other unsupervised and supervised contrastive learning methods. |
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. |
Longtriever: a Pre-trained Long Text Encoder for Dense Document Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing PLMs are infeasible for processing long documents due to computational costs and incomprehensive document understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval model that models local semantics and global context semantics in a tightly-coupled manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes three core challenges of long document retrieval: substantial computational cost, incomprehensive document understanding, and scarce annotations. |
WebUncertainty: Dual-Level Uncertainty Driven Planning and Reasoning For Autonomous Web Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents struggle with complex tasks due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-uncertainty-driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks than existing frameworks. |
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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Bin Xu, Yu Bai, Huashan Sun, Yiguan Lin, Siming Liu, Xinyue Liang, Yaolin Li, Zhuangzhi Dong, Jingren Zhang, Yufan Deng, Xinyu Zou, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set. |
Rethinking Data Mixing from the Perspective of Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Changwei Xu, XinLong Zhao, Jianing Hao, Ran Chen, Yang Liu, Ruijie Xu, Stephen Chen, Guang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mix data with LLMs have relied on domain definitions derived from intuition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reweighting framework that restructures data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GPT-2 models. |
Transfer Learning for Sequence Generation: from Single-source to Multi-source (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pretrained models are effective for low-resource downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage finetuning method to transfer pretrained models to MSG tasks by concatenating multiple sources into a single long sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the WMT17 APE task and multi-source translation task using the WTM14 test set. |
Leveraging Word-Formation Knowledge for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods have not explored word-formations in parataxis languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage word-formation knowledge to enhance Chinese WSD by incorporating word-forms into sense disambiguation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in Chinese word sense disambiguation (WSD) with word-formation knowledge, the results show. |
SGM: Sequence Generation Model for Multi-label Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the correlations between labels and different parts of the text can contribute differently for predicting different labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to view the multi-label classification task as a sequence generation problem and apply a decoder-based sequence generation model to solve it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform previous work by a substantial margin. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
Learning First-Order Logic Rules for Argumentation Mining (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Sun, Guanrong Chen, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Jianzhu Bao, Yuqi Huang, Bin Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Argumentation Mining (AM) aims to extract argumentative structures from texts by identifying argumentation components (ACs) and their argumentative relations (ARs). |
| Approach: | They propose a First- Order Logic reasoning framework for AM to capture logical reasoning paths within argumentative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while significantly improving explainability. |
Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance: A Human-Centric Perspective on User-Generated Content Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Video Quality Assessment (VQA) focuses on aesthetic fidelity and technical distortions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task that evaluates whether a UGC item has positive community resonance based on multimodal attributes rather than visual quality alone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CASTER-Bench . it provides interpretable and empathetic reasoning paths that align with real community feedback. |
Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts. |
| Approach: | They analyze a visual question answering dataset tailored for info-seeking questions . they show that pre-trained visual and language models can use fine-grained knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge learned during pre-training. |
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Zhewen Tan, Wenhan Yu, Jianfeng Si, Tongxin Liu, Kaiqi Guan, Huiyan Jin, Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Xiangzheng Zhang, Duohe Ma, Tong Yang, Lin Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to safety alignment of large language models rely on costly manual annotations or human review. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20%–50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness while preserving high output diversity while achieving 10%–30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
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. |
Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a GAE-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10 points improvement in CLAP score over baseline AR models while maintaining computational parity with best-of-N decoding. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
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Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
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. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuchi Wang, Yishuo Cai, Shuhuai Ren, Sihan Yang, Linli Yao, Yuanxin Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Xu Sun
| Challenge: | Existing recaptioning methods suffer from inaccuracies due to missing fine-grained details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines captions through visual reconstruction using a text-to-image model and a visual reconstruction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on CapsBench and CompreCap by 10%. |
CODIS: Benchmarking Context-dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Chi Chen, Zihao Wan, Zhaolu Kang, Qidong Yan, Yingjie Li, Xiaolong Wang, Siyu Wang, Ziyue Wang, Xiaoyue Mi, Peng Li, Ning Ma, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of models to use contextual information in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to extract and utilize contextual information to improve understanding of images. |
QuoteR: A Benchmark of Quote Recommendation for Writing (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to recommend quotes are evaluated on unpublished datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a dataset that is open and contains three parts including English, standard Chinese and classical Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on all three parts of QuoteR. |
Leveraging Language-based Representations for Better Solving Symbol-related Problems with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Symbols are used in abstract reasoning, chemical property prediction, and tabular question-answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that converts symbols to language-based representations to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of symbols in language-based models. |
IPS: In-Prompt Process Supervision for Short Video Content Moderation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) capture semantics of short video content but fail to account for policy-specific details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates In-prompt Process Supervision into MLLMs . they propose sequential reasoning over ancillary questions during fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | IPS outperforms baseline MLLMs on public and proprietary benchmarks . replacing human-annotated ancillary labels with MLML-generated ones results in performance degradation. |
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) using a constrained-category KIE track and an open-categorical KIE Track. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs show performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. |
Specificity-Driven Cascading Approach for Unsupervised Sentiment Modification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised sentiment modification lack specific information in text generated without parallel data . specificity-driven cascading approach can improve specificity of generated text and content preservation . |
| Approach: | They propose a specificity-driven cascading approach for unsupervised sentiment modification . the method performs target sentiment addition and content reconstruction independently . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competitive systems by a large margin on Yelp and Amazon datasets. |
Continual Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current parallel corpora are not publicly accessible but trained models are more readily available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to take advantage of existing translation models to improve one model of interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on Chinese-English and German-English datasets and is robust to malicious models. |
Mechanistic Insights into Deferred Semantic Drift in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) face a fundamental challenge with delayed disambiguation: how can a model update the meaning of an early, ambiguous token when clarifying context only appears later in the sequence? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defer semantic re-evaluation to subsequent tokens in a process they call "Deferred Semantic Drift" they demonstrate this mechanism in metaphor comprehension and provide causal validation by steering model outputs towards literal or metaphorical meanings via targeted activation interventions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can update the meaning of an ambiguous word when clarifying context arrives only after it has been processed. |
Blinded by Generated Contexts: How Language Models Merge Generated and Retrieved Contexts When Knowledge Conflicts? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with auxiliary information have significantly revolutionized their efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic framework to identify whether LLMs’ responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies whether LLMs’ responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics. |
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang, Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song, ZhiBo Yang, Jimeng Sun, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show. |
Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogue systems are designed to be composed of several functional modules, but lacks a general-purpose instruction-following language model. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully zero-shot autonomous TOD agent that leverages a general-purpose instruction-following language model to decide what to do at each dialogue turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can perform tasks in real-life scenarios with a general-purpose instruction-following language model. |
PASs-MoE: Mitigating Misaligned Co-drift among Router and Experts via Pathway Activation Subspaces for Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LoRA-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods often jointly update the router and experts in an indiscriminate way, causing the router’s preferences to co-drift with experts’ adaptation pathways and exacerbate forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a LoRA-induced subspace that reflects which low-rank pathway directions an input activates in each expert, providing a capability-aligned coordinate system for routing and preservation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms conventional continual learning baselines and MoE–LoRA variants in accuracy and resistance to forgetting, without increasing model parameters. |
PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Mohammad Kachuee, Teja Gollapudi, Minseok Kim, Yin Huang, Kai Sun, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Nirav Shah, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
Streaming Hallucination Detection in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haolang Lu, Minghui Pan, Ripeng LI, Guoshun Nan, Jialin Zhuang, Zijie Zhao, Zhongxiang Sun, Kun Wang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance of large language models, yet hallucinations in such settings often emerge subtly and propagate across reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat step-level hallucination judgments as local observations and introduce a cumulative prefix-level signal that tracks the global evolution of the reasoning state over the entire trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables streaming hallucination detection in long CoT reasoning, providing real-time, interpretable evidence. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing to retrieve knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-filtering-summarization pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%. |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
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Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
Key Fact as Pivot: A Two-Stage Model for Low Resource Table-to-Text Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
ANALOGYKB: Unlocking Analogical Reasoning of Language Models with A Million-scale Knowledge Base (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ANALOGYKB is a million-scale analogy knowledge base based on existing knowledge graphs (KGs) based upon relational knowledge triples, we can discover new analogies using the corresponding relations between concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a million-scale analogy knowledge base derived from existing knowledge graphs (KGs) ANALOGYKB identifies analogies of the same relations and analogies from analogous relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables both smaller LMs and LLMs to gain better analogical reasoning capabilities. |
JTAV: Jointly Learning Social Media Content Representation by Fusing Textual, Acoustic, and Visual Features (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on learning social media content focus on single modal or bi-modal learning, but this approach is non-trivial and challenging because content is multi-modal and involves several types of data, including text, audio, and image. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine textual, acoustic, and visual information to learn social media content by fusing them jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on real-world datasets by a large margin. |
The Butterfly Effect of Model Editing: Few Edits Can Trigger Large Language Models Collapse (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use perplexity as a surrogate metric to determine whether an edited model's performance is affected by a single edit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that even a single edit can cause model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. |
StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhicheng Guo, Sijie Cheng, Hao Wang, Shihao Liang, Yujia Qin, Peng Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual API server and stable evaluation system to assess the stability of large-scale real-time APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks demonstrate the stability of the proposed system and its caching system. |
Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slang semantic variation do not account for the semantic variation of sling among different groups of users. |
| Approach: | They propose to use slang semantic variation models to trace the regional identity of a new emerging sling sense given its historical meanings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can predict regional identity of emerging slang word meanings from historical sling dictionary entries. |
MultiCapCLIP: Auto-Encoding Prompts for Zero-Shot Multilingual Visual Captioning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised visual captioning require large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach that generates captions for different scenarios without labeling . they use concept prompts to retrieve concepts and auto-encode them to learn writing styles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates captions for different scenarios and languages without labeled vision-caption pairs. |
ArgGenBench: Benchmarking the Complex Controlled Argument Generation Capability of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on limited control signals such as topic, stance, length, style, strategy, audience, and key aspects, failing to capture this complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that integrates multi-dimensional control into a single instruction to evaluate LLMs' ability to produce persuasive arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that existing models fail to capture multifaceted argumentative control signals. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational KBQA assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model that models long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on a widely used question type dataset. |
HAHE: Hierarchical Attention for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs in Global and Local Level (2023.acl-long)
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Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Yuhao Yang, Yikai Guo, Mingzhi Sun, Tianyu Yao, Zichen Tang, Kaiyang Wan, Meina Song, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing research on HKGs rarely models the graphical and sequential structure of HKG, limiting their representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Attention model for HKG Embedding that includes global-level and local-level attention to model the graphical structure of HKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on HKG standard datasets and addresses the issue of HKG multi-position prediction for the first time. |
Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing online backdoor defense methods for NLP models focus on anomalies at input or output level, causing fragility to adaptive attacks and high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature-based online defense method to detect poisoned samples . they use a distance-based anomaly score to distinguish poisones from clean samples based on feature-level regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in sentiment analysis and offense detection tasks. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
Two Languages Are Better than One: Bilingual Enhancement for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on internal features of Chinese named entity recognition, but neglect other lingual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual enhancement module for Chinese Named Entity Recognition . they integrate rich English information into Chinese representation and use it to learn the interaction between bilinguals and dependent information within Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn the interaction of bilinguals and dependent information within Chinese. |
HighMATH: Evaluating Math Reasoning of Large Language Models in Breadth and Depth (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yan Liu, Minghui Zhang, Bojian Xiong, Yifan Xiao, Yinong Sun, Yating Mei, Longyu Zeng, Jingchao Yang, Yang Wang, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a gap in math models' accuracy has been widened with the development of large language models (LLMs) . a new study aims to bridge this gap by evaluating a set of high-level math reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate large language models on existing math benchmarks to bridge this gap . they collect 5,293 problems from Chinese senior high school mathematics exams . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on o1-like models and a high-level model. |
Discourse Structure-Aware Prefix for Generation-Based End-to-End Argumentation Mining (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in AM models overlook the integration of supplementary discourse structure information, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which generates discourse structure-aware prefixes for each layer of the generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks. |
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a study of sign language translation without gloss annotations focuses on the problem of gloss annotation . gloss annotation is hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, and limits the domain coverage of translation datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss-free end-to-end sign language translation framework to solve this problem . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves sign language translation performance on large-scale datasets . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities . |
Semantic-Unit-Based Dilated Convolution for Multi-Label Text Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel model for multi-label text classification is proposed for the task of assigning multiple labels for a given text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model for multi-label text classification based on sequence-to-sequence learning and a hybrid attention mechanism that extracts both the word-level and the semantic unit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is competitive to the baseline models and more robust to classifying low-frequency labels. |
Transfer Learning in Biomedical Named Entity Recognition: An Evaluation of BERT in the PharmaCoNER task (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural language processing are labor-intensive and skill-dependent . Currently, most biomedical natural language tasks focus on English documents . |
| Approach: | They introduce a BERT benchmark to facilitate the research of PharmaCoNER task . they evaluate two baselines based on Multilingual BERT and BioBERT on the corpus . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on multilingual BERT and BioBERT on the PharmaCoNER corpus. |
GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup. |
Toward Informal Language Processing: Knowledge of Slang in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have offered a strong potential for natural language systems to process informal language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use movie subtitles to evaluate slang in large language models . they find that smaller LLMs finetuned on the dataset achieve comparable performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate LLMs on slang detection and identification of regional and historical sources for interpretive insights. |
CodeContests+: High-Quality Test Case Generation for Competitive Programming (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Competitive programming has become a key task for training and evaluating large language models . but test cases of competitive programming problems are often difficult to obtain . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent system that creates high-quality test cases for competitive programming problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves code tests on a CodeContests dataset with pass/fail labels. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
Knowledge-Interactive Network with Sentiment Polarity Intensity-Aware Multi-Task Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Emotion Recognition in Conversation models neglect direct utterance-knowledge interaction and use emotion-indirect auxiliary tasks to augment semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-Interactive Network with sentiment polarity intensity-aware multi-task learning which leverages both commonsense knowledge and sentiment lexicon to augment semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows 1.04% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art model on the IEMOCAP dataset. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
Semantically Informed Slang Interpretation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slang interpretation rely on context but ignore semantic extensions common in slings . a semantically informed slapping framework can be applied to enhancing machine translation of informal language . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantically informed slang interpretation framework that considers contextual and semantic appropriateness of a candidate interpretation for a query s. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in slang interpretation in English and in other languages. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
Self-Supervised Quality Estimation for Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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Yuanhang Zheng, Zhixing Tan, Meng Zhang, Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun, Qun Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Training QE models require massive parallel data with hand-crafted quality annotations, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised method to evaluate machine-translated sentences without references by recovering masked target words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous unsupervised methods on several QE tasks in different language pairs and domains. |
EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoqin Sun, Jinghua Zhao, Xuechen Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Wang, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors. |
| Outcome: | The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. |
Chain-of-Thought Compression Should Not Be Blind: V-Skip for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Path Anchoring (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate this via token compression fail due to its autoregressive nature . linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families show that the proposed model achieves a speedup with negligible accuracy loss. |
Stylistic Chinese Poetry Generation via Unsupervised Style Disentanglement (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Automatic Chinese poetry generation is one of the first attempts towards computer writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which requires no supervised style labeling to generate stylistic poems . they incorporate mutual information, a concept in information theory, into modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates stylistic poems without losing fluency and coherency . it is based on mutual information, a concept in information theory . |
Knowledge Representation Learning with Contrastive Completion Coding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods suffer from immaturity on tackling potentially-imperfect knowledge graphs and highly-imbalanced positive-negative instances during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for knowledge representation learning that incorporates two functional components to achieve robust embedding for each entity/relation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better convergence against state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
Beyond Output Confidence: Epistemic-Aware Hallucination Detection with Answer-Level Signals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations are confounded by epistemic uncertainty and cannot distinguish genuine uncertainty from fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic metric that captures epistemic boundary deviations by measuring answer-level stability across multiple stochastic forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms strong uncertainty-only baselines and can be used to detect hallucinations on open-domain question answering, dialogue generation, and code completion. |
End-to-End Learnable Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Depression Detection on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect depression from social media posting history are limited by frozen screening models and lack of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a frozen screening model to train a risky post detection model with psychiatric scales to enable a learnable end-to-end learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several strong baseline methods and qualitative analysis confirms that it better captures users’ mental states than others. |
Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine a Large Language Model (LLM) with prompt-output pairs with equivalent semantics to achieve semantic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. |
Probing Structural Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Model for Argumentation Relation Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation relation classification (ARC) is the most challenging subtask of argumentation mining. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual prior graph neural network to explore probing knowledge and syntactical information for comprehensively modeling the relationship between AC pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three public datasets. |
Decoding the Multimodal Mind: Generalizable Brain-to-Text Translation via Multimodal Alignment and Adaptive Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to decoding language from the human brain rely on unimodal representations, neglecting the brain’s inherently multimodal processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models to align brain signals with a shared semantic space encompassing text, images, and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an 8.48% improvement on the most commonly used benchmark on fMRI datasets with textual, visual, and auditory stimuli. |
Neural Quality Estimation with Multiple Hypotheses for Grammatical Error Correction (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing GEC models produce spurious corrections or fail to detect lots of errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network for GEC quality estimation with multiple hypotheses . VERNet establishes interactions among hypothese based on reasoning graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art grammatical error detection performance and best quality estimation results on four GEC datasets. |
A Deep Reinforced Sequence-to-Set Model for Multi-Label Classification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-label classification (MLC) aims to assign multiple labels to each sample. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-set model that is trained via reinforcement learning and rewards feedback independent of the label order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and reduces sensitivity to label order. |
MuKA: Multimodal Knowledge Augmented Visual Information-Seeking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual information-seeking tasks rely on textual knowledge . existing methods can impair information retrieval and confuse MLLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages a multimodal knowledge base to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the InfoSeek and E-VQA benchmarks. |
Markovian Linguistic-Temporal Bridge: Unlocking the Potential of LLMs for Time Series Forecasting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) are based on token-level linguistic-temporal alignment, leading to stacking of logically disjointed tokens as input. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills latent evolutionary patterns of language into a Markovian state transition graph, which is transferred as a structural prior to the time series domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves global structural isomorphism between the linguistic and temporal domains. |
Enhancing Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models through Self-Distillation from Resource-Rich Languages (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary large language models (LLMs) are pre-trained on multilingual corpora, but their performance lags behind in most languages compared to a few resource-rich languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the internal capabilities of large language models on resource-rich languages to enhance multilingual performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual performance while minimizing impact on original performance in resource-rich languages. |
Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train self-trained models to learn noise invariant sequence representations . they encourage consistency between original sequence and corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks and achieves 0.6% gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% increment on NLVR2 . |
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. |
ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional fine-tuning ignores one-to-many nature of language, leading to overfitting . authors propose a method to fine- tune LLMs by leveraging tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune Large Language Models by leveraging tokens to mask low-probability tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks. |
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. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
Applying Contrastive Learning to Code Vulnerability Type Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to classification of vulnerabilities ignore their relationships and treat each class in isolation, resulting in non-scalable code vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to bring vector representations of related CWEs closer together and use max-pooling to enable the model to handle longer vulnerability code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.97%-17.90% on accuracy and 0.98%-22.27% on weighted-F1 with even better performance on higher-quality datasets. |
Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jiahao Zhu, Daizong Liu, Pan Zhou, Xing Di, Yu Cheng, Song Yang, Wenzheng Xu, Zichuan Xu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun, Zeyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal sentence grounding ignore two crucial issues . 1) Boundary-bias: the video downsampling process may lose these two frames . 2) Reasoning-biases: such incorrect new boundary frames lead to the reasoning bias . |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames . they use a reasoning strategy to learn the inter-relationship among these frames a . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of a new siamese sampling network on three challenging datasets. |
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. |
Probing Graph Decomposition for Argument Pair Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages within a discussion. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages . they propose to decompose the probing graph into four sub-graphs based on inter- and intra-passage perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on strong baselines on two benchmark datasets. |
Sheep’s Skin, Wolf’s Deeds: Are LLMs Ready for Metaphorical Implicit Hate Speech? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | specialized models fail to detect implicit hate speech due to its indirectly expressed hateful intent . advanced LLMs often misinterpret metaphorical implicit hate content, resulting in its propagation . |
| Approach: | They propose a Jailbreaking strategy and Energy-based Constrained Decoding techniques to detect implicit hate speech in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate metaphorical implicit hate speech, but it fails to detect it effectively. |
MPBoCo: Multimodal Prompt-based Boundary-enhanced Continual Framework for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to balance real-time adaptability and computational efficiency in continual learning scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual Multimodal Entity and Relation Joint Extraction task and a Multimodal Prompt-based Boundary-enhanced Continuum framework that stores task-specific knowledge via learnable multimodal prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-world scenarios by 5.5% and 7.2%. |
Exploiting Summarization Data to Help Text Simplification (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text simplification datasets are limited to Wikipedia and Newsela, restricting further development of this field. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment algorithm to extract sentence pairs from summarization datasets and a method to filter suitable pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can extract sentence pairs from summarization datasets and perform well with real datasets. |
Learn and Consolidate: Continual Adaptation for Zero-Shot and Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual neural machine translation models perform poorly on language pairs with no parallel corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach that encourages original models to acquire language-agnostic multilingual representations from new data and preserves the model architecture without introducing parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance in translation directions where existing models are weak and mitigates degeneration in the well-performing translation directions, offering flexibility in the real-world scenario. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer text style focus on sentence-level data, limiting performance . current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to transform official texts into public-speaking styles by analyzing real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to transform public speaking texts into public-speaking styles . the proposed framework analyzes characteristics and identifies problems of stylized texts . |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that share entity embeddings of knowledge graphs (KGs) would incur a severe privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a new attack method that aims to recover the original embedding information based on the known entity embeddables of FedE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to infer whether a specific relation exists in a private client. |
Enhancing Machine Translation with Self-Supervised Preference Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to constructing preference data rely on human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which efficiently constructs translation preference data for iterative training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation preference data on large language models. |
On the Language Coverage Bias for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Language coverage bias is important for neural machine translation because of the target-original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to alleviate the language coverage bias problem by explicitly distinguishing between the source-and target-original training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve translation tasks on both back-and forward-translation and their tagged variants. |
An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for empathetic response generation ignore the associated words between dialogue utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative associative memory model to capture associated words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module for storing associated words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures key words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module, thereby accurately and nuancedly comprehending the utterables. |
MiniConGTS: A Near Ultimate Minimalist Contrastive Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches within the pretraining-finetuning paradigm tend to meticulously craft complex tagging schemes and classification heads, or incorporate external semantic enhancements to enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a minimalist tagging scheme and a novel token-level contrastive learning strategy to improve pretrained representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques while featuring a more compact design and reduced computational overhead. |
Learning to Control the Fine-grained Sentiment for Story Ending Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on controlling the sentiment of story endings. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic and novel framework which controls fine-grained sentiment intensity for automatic story ending generation without manually annotating sentiment labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate story endings which meet the given sentiment intensity better. |
WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing reverse dictionary systems only support English reverse dictionary queries . a reverse dictionary can help people who can't remember a word from memory . |
| Approach: | They propose an online reverse dictionary system that outperforms other reverse dictionary systems . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English cross-lingual reverse dictionary queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reverse dictionary outperforms other reverse dictionary systems on performance . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English queries . |
A New Benchmark and Reverse Validation Method for Passage-level Hallucination Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of working with humans in real-world scenarios, but they are prone to generate hallucinations and misinformation when deployed for mission-critical tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-check approach to detect factual errors in a zero-resource fashion by using reverse validation to generate a hallucination detection benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while costing fewer tokens and less time. |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiqing Sun, Sheng Shen, Shengcao Cao, Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yikang Shen, Chuang Gan, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Yiming Yang, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modality can result in "hallucination" . developing LMMs faces challenges such as a lack of data and a limited number of data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 96% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 and an improvement of 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. |
UltraLink: An Open-Source Knowledge-Enhanced Multilingual Supervised Fine-tuning Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Haoyu Wang, Shuo Wang, Yukun Yan, Xujia Wang, Zhiyu Yang, Yuzhuang Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Liner Yang, Ning Ding, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Open-source large language models (LLMs) have gained strength across diverse fields, but the majority of studies focus on English. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-grounded data augmentation approach to elicit more language-specific knowledge of LLMs by enhancing their ability to serve users from different countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can prune the language-agnostic supervised fine-tuning dataset without any performance degradation. |
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. |
SafeLawBench: Towards Safe Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Chuxue Cao, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Qichao Sun, Zhenghao Zhu, Wu Yinyu, Josef Dai, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that large language models (LLMs) may exhibit risks, including threats to the protection of private data and the generation of hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs from a legal perspective using the SafeLawBench benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards and includes 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering tasks. |
SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yubo Ma, Zhibin Gou, Junheng Hao, Ruochen Xu, Shuohang Wang, Liangming Pan, Yujiu Yang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | SciAgent surpasses other LLMs with the comparable size by more than 8.0% in absolute accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented scientific reasoning setting that supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets and builds a benchmark to evaluate LLM’s abilities with tool assistance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed setting augments LLMs with scalable toolsets and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. |
Self-Knowledge Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning due to the computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which lets LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms chain-of-thought based and fully retrieval-based methods on multiple datasets and outperformed chain- of-though, chatGPT and InstructGPT. |
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Zhichao Yang, Gen Li, Ye Qiu, Zhaoxin Fan, Yifan Sun, Wenjun wu, Jin Dong, Xiaotie Deng
| Challenge: | Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead. |
Rethinking Data Mixture for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey and New Perspectives (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data mixture improve the generalization capability of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained categorization of existing methods and propose three subtypes of offline and online methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods extend beyond offline and online classifications and highlight key challenges in the field of data mixture. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
MAAM: A Morphology-Aware Alignment Model for Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that morphological variation is an intractable challenge for the unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a morphology-aware alignment model to alleviate the adverse effect of morphological variation by introducing grammatical information learned by the pre-trained denoising language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised systems and achieves competitive performance compared to supervised methods. |
Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Context (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level context translation ignore documentlevel context. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level context encoder to represent document- level context and integrate it into the Transformer model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on NIST Chinese-English and IWSLT French-English datasets show that the proposed translation model outperforms the Transformer model significantly. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-utterance conditional VAE to estimate posterior probability distribution of latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features from past and future sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets. |
Human-Agent Collaborative Paper-to-Page Crafting (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianli Ma, Siyu Wang, Chen Yilin, Yinhao Tang, Yixiang Yang, Chang Guo, Bingjie Gao, Zhening Xing, Yanan Sun, Zhipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to create project pages from academic papers have focused on static slides and posters, but the dynamic nature of webpages remains an unaddressed challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent system that deconstructs paper-to-page creation into a coarse-to fine pipeline from narrative planning to multimodal content generation and interactive rendering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, visually appealing pages in under 15 minutes for less than $0.1 . |
Does Higher Order LSTM Have Better Accuracy for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data? (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models take long distance dependencies into account when predicting the tag of the current token. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture long distance tag dependencies and use them for dependency analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict multiple tags for the current token without taking dependencies between tags into account. |
A New Dataset and Empirical Study for Sentence Simplification in Chinese (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Sentence simplification is a valuable technique that can benefit language learners and children. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for assessing sentence simplification in Chinese using manual simplifications from human annotators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese sentences are more accessible to children and nonnative readers than English sentences. |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Alternated Training with Synthetic and Authentic Data for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesizing data in NMT focus on leveraging monolingual data in training. |
| Approach: | They propose alternated training with synthetic and authentic data to improve NMT models' performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves Chinese-English and German-English translation tasks over strong baselines. |
Sparse Growing Transformer: Training-Time Sparse Depth Allocation via Progressive Attention Looping (2026.findings-acl)
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Yao Chen, Yilong Chen, Yinqi Yang, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zefeng Zhang, Shuaiyi Nie, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to increasing effective depth of LLMs rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time sparse depth allocation framework that progressively increases depth for a small subset of parameters as training evolves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of language models while reducing training FLOPs overhead from approximately 16–20% to only 1–3% relative to a standard Transformer backbone. |
Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator (2024.lrec-main)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for large language models lack the ability to calibrate their outputs towards human preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to calibrate an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves correlation with expert evaluation on multiple text quality evaluation datasets. |
Hallucination Detection in Long-Form Text Generated by LLMs: A Benchmark and a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Approach (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are coarse-grained and lack long-range consistency checks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-form hallucination detection that incorporates diverse entity types and intricate factual dependencies spanning extended contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and robustly integrates fact-centric hyper-relational knowledge graphs. |
MultiAgentESC: A LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Emotional Support Conversation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on generating responses directly and neglect integration of domain-specific reasoning and expert interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free multi-agent collaboration framework for ESC to emulate human-like process of providing emotional support through dialogue analysis, strategy deliberation, and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at providing emotional support and diversifying support strategy selection. |
MQuinE: a Cure for “Z-paradox” in Knowledge Graph Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models suffer from Z-paradox, a deficiency in expressiveness . Embedding-based models map each entity and relation into a vector or matrix . |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge graph embedding model that does not suffer from Z-paradox while preserves strong expressiveness to model various relation patterns with theoretical justification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on link prediction tasks while maintaining strong expressiveness. |
Weakly Supervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Relative Representations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Weakly supervised vision-and-language pre-training (WVLP) uses only local descriptions of images as cross-modal anchors to construct weakly-aligned image-text pairs for pre- training. |
| Approach: | They propose to take a small number of aligned image-text pairs as anchors and represent each unaligned image and text by its similarities to these anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the cost of pre-training while maintaining decent performance on downstream tasks. |
Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal pre-training, cross-modal retrieval remains challenging . lack of relation consistency impairs contextualized representation of image-text pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin. |
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases. |
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Wei Du, Jie Wang, Wenze Zhou, Xiangfeng Meng, Zhengyang Wang, Suping Sun, Ziwei Du, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Yongbin Liu, Shicheng Tan, Jiahao Ying, Shu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions. |
O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video captioning consider a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects. |
| Approach: | They propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach to video captioning . it performs three steps: 1) identify the focused objects and predict their locations . 2) generate related attribute words and relation words of these focused objects to form a draft caption . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art methods but with higher diversity and faster inference speed. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
Arg-LLaDA: Argument Summarization via Large Language Diffusion Models and Sufficiency-Aware Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to argument summarization rely on single-pass generation, offering limited support for factual correction or structural refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language diffusion framework that iteratively improves argument summarization by sufficiency-guided remasking and regeneration. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Arg-LLaDA surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in 7 out of 10 evaluation metrics. |
Intent Discovery with Frame-guided Semantic Regularization and Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing intent discovery methods focus on transferring prior knowledge of known intents to unknown ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to use frame knowledge as conceptual semantic guidance to bridge the gap between known intents representation learning and unknown intents clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms solid baselines on two benchmark datasets. |
DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaojun Bi, Shuo Li, Junyao Xing, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Weizheng Qiao, Lu Han, Ziwei Sun, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Dongba pictographic is the only pictograph script still in use in the world. |
| Approach: | DongbaMIE is the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongbe pictographs. |
| Outcome: | The dataset contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Unveiling and Addressing Pseudo Forgetting in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning have not been studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-guided replay framework that allows models to leverage their capabilities and provide partial external correct rationales to the original instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates pseudo forgetting while maintaining model plasticity. |
Automatic Academic Paper Rating Based on Modularized Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to rate academic papers require a lot of feature engineering and can cause inequality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a novel convolutional neural network to automatically rate academic papers . they propose to build a dataset to automatically determine whether to accept academic papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by a large margin. |
A Template-based Method for Constrained Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve this problem can not satisfy the following three desiderata: (1) high translation quality, (2) high match accuracy, and (3) low latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method that can provide high translation quality and match accuracy and a low latency inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in lexically and structurally constrained translation tasks and can be used in a variety of applications. |
The Fall of ROME: Understanding the Collapse of LLMs in Model Editing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that model editing methods can cause large language models to collapse with just a single edit. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses prefixed keys and adds prefixes during testing to prevent model collapse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method prevents model collapse while maintaining effectiveness, the authors show . Rank-One Model Editing (ROME) has been found to cause model collapse with just a single edit . |
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)
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Hexiang Tan, Wanli Yang, Junwei Zhang, Xin Chen, Rui Tang, Du Su, Jingang Wang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Fei Sun, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines. |
Context-Situated Pun Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Shuyang Gao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | a new task for context-situated pun generation uses a given context to generate puns . human evaluation shows that 69% of top retrieved pun words can be used to generate context-based puns. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where puns are generated based on contextual keywords and pun words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates successful puns 31% of the time given a plausible tuple of context words and pun pairs. |
AiraXiv: An AI-Driven Open-Access Platform for Human and AI Scientists (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions. |
Unveil: Unified Visual-Textual Integration and Distillation for Multi-modal Document Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document retrieval in real-world scenarios faces significant challenges due to diverse document formats and modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-textual embedding framework that integrates textual and visual features for robust document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed visual-textual embedding framework surpasses existing methods while preserving semantic fidelity. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build LLMs with stacking are limited by their information coverage and low fault tolerance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to iteratively generate new queries from an input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
TOI-CNN: a Solution of Information Extraction on Chinese Insurance Policy (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Element Tagging on insurance policies can be used to streamline manual review of hundreds of contracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-of-interest convolutional neural network (TOI-CNN) to replace traditional pooling layer for processing nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can automatically convert a massive amount of insurance policies into structural archives for management and comparison. |
CDAˆ2: Counterfactual Diffusion Augmentation for Cross-Domain Adaptation in Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Domain adaptation is widely employed in cross-domain sentiment analysis, but concerns have been raised regarding their robustness and sensitivity to data distribution shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework CDA2 for cross-domain adaptation in low-resource sentiment analysis which employs counterfactual diffusion augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality counterfactual target samples and achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
Modeling Semantic Compositionality with Sememe Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic compositionality (SC) is defined as the phenomenon that the meaning of a complex linguistic unit can be composed of the meanings of its constituents. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate sememes into SC models and employ them in learning multiword expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve significant performance boost compared to baseline methods without sememe knowledge. |
How Does In-Context Learning Help Prompt Tuning? (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of parameter-efficient adaptation methods are needed to fine-tune large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines prompt tuning and in-context learning to improve prompt tuning by concatenating a natural language demonstration with learned prompt embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt tuning and prompt tuning on five language generation tasks. |
Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that REtrieving from the traINing datA only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve training instances from traINing datA and concatenate them with input to generate output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. |
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. |
CORES: Code-Oriented Reasoning for Complex Text-to-SQL and Generalizable TableQA (2026.findings-acl)
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Meng Zhang, Ruochun Jin, Yuanxi Peng, Wenjing Yang, Haotian Wang, Liting Sun, Kun Hu, Silin Yang, Zhang Ke-di
| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL models struggle with complex analytical tasks such as generating simple SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-sql model that leverages Python as a procedural reasoning pivot to enhance both complex SQL generation and tabular reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on six text-to-SQL benchmarks by 6.44% on average while maintaining good capability on three tableQA benchmarks. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |
Fine-Tuning Deteriorates General Textual Out-of-Distribution Detection by Distorting Task-Agnostic Features (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting out-of-distribution inputs are underexplored . detecting semantic and non-semantic shifts is difficult for pre-tuned pre-trainers . |
| Approach: | They propose a general OOD score that integrates confidence scores from task-agnostic and task-specific representations to improve detecting semantic and non-semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two cross-task benchmarks with semantic and non-semantic shifts. |
A Discourse-Aware Graph Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Multi-Party Conversation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior research focuses on exploring sequential information but ignores the discourse structures of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware graph neural network (ERMC-DisGCN) that leverages contextual cues and speaker-specific features for ERMC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms multiple baselines showing that discourse structures are of great value to ERMC. |
Active Retrieval Augmented Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhengbao Jiang, Frank Xu, Luyu Gao, Zhiqing Sun, Qian Liu, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yiming Yang, Jamie Callan, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Generative language models (LMs) have a tendency to hallucinate and create inaccurate output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks . iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content . |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies require massive labeled data to train models for multimodal data analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal prompt model that captures specific aspect terms in a few-shot scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on two MABSA-related tasks on a few-shot dataset. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |
Multimodal Machine Translation with Text-Image In-depth Questioning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal machine translation (MMT) models focus on intermodal interactions, but focus on simple interactions between nouns and entities in image, overlooking global semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a Text-Image In-depth Questioning method to deepen interactions and optimize translations by utilizing visual data to capture global semantic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on five translation directions of Multi30K and AmbigCaps, with +2.35 BLEU on the challenging MSCOCO benchmark. |
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. |