Papers by Yang Yi
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
L2Dir: Integrating L_2-Norm and Directional Alignment for Unsupervised Contrastive Representation Learning in Multimodal Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyu Zong, Rui Dai, Hongzhu Yi, Yuanxiang Wang, Zhenghao Zhang, Zhenyu Guan, Yujia Yang, Bingkang Shi, Yueyang Ding, Xiangxiang Chu, Kaikui Liu, Jungang Xu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal representation learning focus on directional alignment and embedding magnitudes (L2-norm) however, these methods often fail to account for the intrinsic role of L2-norm in the contrastive process. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that optimizes L2-norm alignment and Directional consistency jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves consistent and significant performance gains over established baselines across 95 tasks using UniIR and VLM2Vec-V2 frameworks. |
ASPO: Adaptive Sentence-Level Preference Optimization for Fine-Grained Multimodal Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have extended DPO to multimodal scenarios, achieving strong performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a sentence-level preference optimization technique to optimize individual sentences for more precise preference optimization without additional models or parameters. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Adaptive Sentence-level Preference Optimization significantly improves the alignment of multimodal models. |
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection techniques are designed for small data pools, a study finds . filtering data by token length is an efficient method for improving results . |
| Approach: | They use self-scoring methods that do not rely on external help to perform fine-tuning . they also find that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform random selection on large datasets on large data pools. |
SILO-BENCH: A Scalable Environment for Evaluating Distributed Coordination in Multi-Agent LLM Systems (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhe Zhang, Feiran Liu, Yi Shan, Xinyi Huang, Xin Yang, Yueqi Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Wenyuan Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks conflate coordination ability with role-based priors. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-free benchmark for evaluating free-form collaboration under information silos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically probes coordination capabilities under information silos using 54 configurations and 3 frontier LLMs. |
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-turn tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for agentic reinforcement learning that integrates turn-level tree search with tree search to address key challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses key challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. |
Is ChatGPT a Financial Expert? Evaluating Language Models on Financial Natural Language Processing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized general natural language preprocessing tasks, but their performance in financial domains is not evaluated comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate financial language models on financial tasks . they compare performance of auto-encoding language models and ChatGPT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares the performance of auto-encoding language models and the LLM ChatGPT on financial tasks. |
A Learnable Skill Combination Strategy for Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a novel multi-task learning framework for domain-specific natural language understanding tasks addresses these limitations by combing multiple tasks into a single framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that decomposes the language model into modular skill components and employs a dynamic, learnable skill-combination mechanism to adaptively handle diverse tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses conventional multi-task learning approaches in performance. |
A Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network for Sentiment Classification (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentiment classification approaches do not fully exploit sentiment linguistic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network to integrate sentiment linguistic knowledge into the deep neural network via attention mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network captures sentiments from different representation sub-spaces, and is superior to strong competitors. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
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. |
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. |
Repairing Catastrophic-Neglect in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Attention-Guided Feature Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Diffusion models generate high-quality images from textual descriptions, but they often produce images that do not fully align with the input prompts, resulting in semantic inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated repair approach to address catastrophic-neglect in T2I DMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10.1%-16.3% higher Correct Rate in image generation compared to baselines. |
Automated Progressive Red Teaming (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Automated red teaming (ART) is effective but time-consuming, costly and lacks scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated red teaming framework that generates adversarial prompts to expose LLM vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework explores and exploits LLM vulnerabilities through multi-round interactions. |
FinEntity: Entity-level Sentiment Classification for Financial Texts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | FinEntity annotates financial entity spans and their sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative) in financial news. |
| Approach: | They introduce an entity-level sentiment classification dataset called FinEntity that annotates financial entity spans and their sentiment in financial news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset annotates financial entity spans and their sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative) in financial news. |
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. |
MS2SL: Multimodal Spoken Data-Driven Continuous Sign Language Production (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for sign language production are limited due to phonological differences and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for continuous sign language production that generates sign predictions step by step from text or speech embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performance on how2sign and PHOENIX14T datasets. |
Task-oriented Domain-specific Meta-Embedding for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods neglect domain-specific knowledge and use the same word embedding for each word in all domain-specified datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate domain-specific and task-oriented information into meta-embeddings by combining pre-trained word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on four text classification datasets and shows that it is compatible with existing methods. |
Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons: Retraining-Free Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures require loading all expert parameters . previous work focused on expert pruning and merging but focused on neuron-level structure . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic framework for expert pruning and reconstruction . it prunes redundant experts using router statistics, then decomposes them into neuron-level expert segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of experts and memory usage, making it easier to deploy. |
Auto-Debias: Debiasing Masked Language Models with Automated Biased Prompts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate human-like biases in pretrained language models are based on external corpora and require a distribution alignment loss to mitigate them. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic method to mitigate biases in pretrained language models by searching for biased prompts such that cloze-style completions are the most different with respect to different demographic groups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces biases in pretrained language models, including gender and racial bias, and improves fairness of the models. |
Benchmarking Intersectional Biases in NLP (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on fairness of machine learning models has focused on how to debias, but research on the fairness and performance of biased/debiased models on downstream prediction tasks has been limited. |
| Approach: | They assess intersectional bias - fairness across multiple demographic dimensions . they highlight possible causes and make recommendations for future NLP debiasing research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches fare well in terms of fairness-accuracy trade-off, but are unable to effectively alleviate bias in downstream tasks. |
DELMAN: Dynamic Defense Against Large Language Model Jailbreaking with Model Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety mechanisms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are inadequate to protect against jailbreak attacks, resulting in performance degradation on general tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly updates a minimal set of relevant parameters to neutralize harmful behaviors while preserving the model’s utility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods in mitigating jailbreak attacks while preserving the model’s utility. |
PLATO-Ad: A Unified Advertisement Text Generation Framework with Multi-Task Prompt Learning (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Zeyang Lei, Chao Zhang, Xinchao Xu, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-yu Niu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Yi Yang, Shuanglong Li
| Challenge: | Online advertisement text generation models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, but some challenges remain, such as low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning to tackle low-resource ade generation problem and a multi-step prompt learning mechanism to efficiently solve multiple aed generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on offline and online metrics. |
Evaluating and Aligning Human Economic Risk Preferences in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making scenarios that involve risk assessment, yet their alignment with human economic rationality remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation metric called Risk Disparity Score (RDS) and assess whether LLM-generated responses reflect appropriate levels of risk aversion or risk-seeking behavior based on individual’s persona. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric assesses whether LLM-generated responses reflect appropriate levels of risk aversion or risk-seeking behavior based on individual’s persona. |
Interpreting Twitter User Geolocation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying user geolocation suffer from a lack of interpretability on the corresponding results. |
| Approach: | They adopt influence functions to interpret the behavior of GNN-based models by identifying the importance of training users when predicting locations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method provides meaningful explanations on prediction results and also uncovers the so-called "black-box" GNN-based models by investigating the effect of individual nodes. |
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. |
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. |
Fast and Accurate Factual Inconsistency Detection Over Long Documents (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative AI models exhibit remarkable potential, however, hallucinations across various tasks present a significant challenge, particularly for longer inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic model that uses large text chunks to condition over long texts and employ a novel algorithm to explain its decisions through relevant source sentence retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on benchmarks and a new long-form dialogue dataset and surpasses competitive systems in efficiency and model explanation evaluations. |
Distributed LLM Serving on Consumer-Grade GPUs by Reconciling Computation and Communication (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lewei Jin, Kui Zhang, Yongqi Chen, null Zhuoyifan, Renjie Li, Yi Gao, Bowei Yang, Zhengong Cai, Wei Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models are reshaping internet services, and serving them is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient distributed LLM serving system that splits prefill and decode requests into smaller chunks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces TTFT, TPOT, and latency compared to the state-of-the-art system. |
HELENE: Hessian Layer-wise Clipping and Gradient Annealing for Accelerating Fine-tuning LLM with Zeroth-order Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face memory challenges due to the high cost of backpropagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization that matches memory usage to inference . they propose scalable and memory-efficient zeroth order (ZE) optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping as a second-order pre-conditioner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average speedup of 20 over MeZO on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B. |
Representation Potentials of Foundation Models for Multimodal Alignment: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | foundation models learn highly transferable representations through large-scale pretraining on diverse data. |
| Approach: | They examine the representation potentials of foundation models by examining their latent capacity to capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The foundation models exhibit remarkable similarities across architectures and modalities, the authors show . the models can capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modality. |
Tiny-NewsRec: Effective and Efficient PLM-based News Recommendation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work fine tunes the PLM with the news recommendation task, which can cause a domain shift problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised method to adapt general PLM to news domain with a contrastive matching task between news titles and news bodies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of the large PLM-based news recommendation model while maintaining its performance. |
Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA focus on utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations, but they neglect visual-language interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to break down video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance alignment between two modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the NExT-QA benchmark. |
BARLE: Background-Aware Representation Learning for Background Shift Out-of-Distribution Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for OOD detection focus on identifying semantic-shift OOD samples . background-shift detection is more practical but challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a background-aware representation learning approach for background-shift OOD detection in NLP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves background-shift OOD detection while maintaining ID classification accuracy. |
Bridging the Gap between Relevance Matching and Semantic Matching for Short Text Similarity Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for relevance and semantic matching cannot be easily adapted to the other. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
PsyChain: A Collaborative Chain-of-Agents Framework for Generating Personalized and Professional Counseling Dialogues (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing psychological counseling datasets suffer from monolithic client personas, insufficient therapeutic depth, and a lack of process controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evolves static counseling corpora into high-fidelity dialogues . they use a Client Profiler that pairs life scenarios with psychological personality archetypes based on client personality and stage progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 61-91% win rates against domain-specific baselines in pairwise evaluation and the highest average score in human evaluation, indicating potential for real-world counseling. |
PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking bidirectional interaction nature of empathy. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates empathy from a single perspective . they propose PERM to integrate a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality . |
| Outcome: | a new reward model outperforms state-of-the-art models on an emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset. |
Understanding How Value Neurons Shape the Generation of Specified Values in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to interpret value representations are limited by superficial judgments over mechanistic analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretability framework that uses the Schwartz Values Survey to interpret value . they use a dataset that operationalizes four dimensions of universal value through behavioral contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges psychological value frameworks with neuron analysis in large language models. |
Adapting General-Purpose Embedding Models to Private Datasets Using Keyword-based Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text embedding models show strong performance on generic benchmarks, but their effectiveness diminishes when applied to private datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for adapting general-purpose text embedding models to private datasets . they construct supervisory signals from the ranking of keyword-based retrieval results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval performance across domains, datasets, and models. |
Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing long document question answering systems process texts as flat sequences or use heuristic chunking, which overlooks the discourse structures that guide human comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware hierarchical framework that leverages rhetorical structure theory for long document question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong robustness across diverse document types and linguistic settings. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Collective Entity Disambiguation with Structured Gradient Tree Boosting (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on structured gradient tree boosting for collective entity disambiguation is limited to regular classification or regression problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured learning model that uses gradient tree boosting to disambiguate named entities in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural system by near 1% absolute accuracy on the popular AIDA-CoNLL dataset. |
Convolutional Neural Networks with Recurrent Neural Filters (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use recurrent neural networks as convolution filters to capture language compositionality and long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as convolution filters to capture language compositionality and long-term dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed convolutional neural networks achieve state-of-the-art on two sentences and the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. |
RLKGF: Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph Feedback Without Human Annotations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lack of human preference labels remains a significant bottleneck when applying RLHF to a downstream domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human priors encoded in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to derive RL rewards in the absence of manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three public and one private medical dialogue datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the competitive RLAIF in improving LLM diagnostic accuracy. |
Offline Reinforcement Learning for LLM Multi-step Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline method for enhancing multi-step reasoning by optimizing the soft Bellman Equation by combining a policy model and a value function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on multi-step reasoning benchmarks and can be extended to multi-iteration frameworks when additional resources are available. |
One Refiner to Unlock Them All: Inference-Time Reasoning Elicitation via Reinforcement Query Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and lack the flexibility to fully activate their latent reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that treats reasoning elicitation as an inference-time alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 2.1% on average across diverse architectures and benchmarks. |
Language Model is Suitable for Correction of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions Recognition (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handwritten mathematical expression recognition are limited by CFGs and pre-generated triplet data. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that integrates recognition and language features to output corrected sequences while optimizing with a string decoder recognition model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CROHME datasets. |
CQIL: Inference Latency Optimization with Concurrent Computation of Quasi-Independent Layers (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve inference efficiency target to reduce per-layer latency, but ignore cumulative latency due to number of layers. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify quasi-independent layers that can be concurrently computed to significantly decrease inference latency. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method reduces latency by 48.3% on LLaMA-33B while maintaining close level of performance. |
Revealing the Numeracy Gap: An Empirical Investigation of Text Embedding Models (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Text embedding models are widely used in natural language processing but are often benchmarked on tasks that do not require understanding nuanced numerical information in text. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 13 widely used text embedding models and find they struggle to capture numerical details accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models struggle to capture nuanced numerical details accurately, despite being benchmarked on tasks that do not require understanding nuance. |
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. |
RTADev: Intention Aligned Multi-Agent Framework for Software Development (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are efficient assistants to humans in software development tasks, but they can cause errors during the development process. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention aligned multi-agent framework that ensures that all agents work based on a consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces errors and improves the quality of generated software code. |
Constructing a Psychometric Testbed for Fair Natural Language Processing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Psychometric dimensions are important for understanding user behavior in various contexts including health, security, e-commerce, and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a corpus for psychometric natural language processing related to important dimensions such as trust, anxiety, numeracy, and literacy, in the health domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus includes 8,502 user-generated responses from 8,502-person survey datasets and includes self-reported demographic information, including race, sex, age, income, and education. |
[MASK] Insertion: a robust method for anti-adversarial attacks (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on adversarial defenses against pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial defensing algorithm that inserts tokens into input sequences . they show an improvement in accuracy between 3.2 and 11.1 absolute points . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves model accuracy on clean and polluted inputs compared with state-of-the-art models . |
Beyond Excess and Deficiency: Adaptive Length Bias Mitigation in Reward Models for RLHF (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate length bias in reward models have decreased accuracy . achieving an automatic proxy that perfectly replicates human judgment is challenging in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive approach that dynamically adjusts the influence of response length in reward evaluations according to the context of the query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces unnecessary verbosity while improving overall response quality. |
Identifying Pre-training Data in LLMs: A Neuron Activation-Based Detection Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting pre-training data in large language models rely on superficial features like prediction confidence and loss, resulting in mediocre performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm to analyze neuron activation patterns between training and non-training data in large language models to improve their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods across three benchmarks and multiple LLMs. |
Seeing the wood for the trees: a contrastive regularization method for the low-resource Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Knowledge Base Question Answering rely on semantic parsing and information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive regularization based method to extract correct answer entities from a context knowledge base and a corresponding question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WebQuestionsSP dataset and the effectiveness of proposed modules is also evaluated. |
Context-Aware Language Modeling for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Goal-oriented dialogue systems face a trade-off between fluent language generation and task-specific control. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune language models in a goal-aware way . they evaluate a flight-booking method with a context-assisted language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method on a flight-booking task by 7% in terms of task success. |
PizzaPal: Conversational Pizza Ordering using a High-Density Conversational AI Platform (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | a pizza ordering bot that can be used to order pizzas is described in this paper. |
| Approach: | They describe PizzaPal, a voice-only agent for ordering pizza, and the Conversational AI architecture built at b4.ai. |
| Outcome: | The pizza ordering bot is based on a dialog framework developed by b4.ai . |
Knowledge Context Modeling with Pre-trained Language Models for Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-based knowledge graph completion methods neglect knowledge contexts in inferring process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which models the knowledge context as additional prompts with pre-trained language models for knowledge graph completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on FB15k-237, WN18RR and Wikidata5M datasets. |
FinMTEB: Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text embedding benchmarks for financial domains are inadequately addressing the nuanced requirements of specialized domains like finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a finance-adapted embedding model that outperforms general-purpose models . they also introduce a new model, Fin-E5, which is also open-sourced . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms general-purpose models on financial embedding tasks. |
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. |
Compound AI Systems Optimization: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and AI systems have led to a paradigm shift in the design and optimization of complex workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic review of recent progress in optimizing compound AI systems . they formalize the notion of compound AI system optimization and classify existing methods along several key dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods in the field of compound AI and highlight open research challenges and future directions. |
PlotGen-Bench: Evaluating VLMs on Generating Visualization Code from Diverse Plots across Multiple Libraries (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | PlotGen-Bench evaluates vision-language models' ability to generate executable visualization code from plots under realistic and complex visualization requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate plot-to-code generation in vision-language models . they use Matplot, Matplos, Mat3D, Mat4D, and Mat4E to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 9 major categories, 30 subcategories, and 3 core tasks . it covers 2D, 3D and animated plots across 5 widely used visualization libraries. |
Interpretable Operational Risk Classification with Semi-Supervised Variational Autoencoder (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text classification frameworks for operational risk prediction lack interpretability and labeled data are often misaligned. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised text classification framework that integrates multi-head attention mechanism with Semi-supervised variational inference for operational risk classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on a real-world dataset and can use unlabeled data to learn visually interpretable representations. |
Video2Roleplay: A Multimodal Dataset and Framework for Video-Guided Role-playing Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RPAs focus on static role profiles, overlooking dynamic perceptual abilities inherent to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
D2PCM:A Multi-Turn Dialogue Dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Conventional interactive algorithms have predominantly treated memory as a contextual element, neglecting the nuanced cognitive processes involved in individualized memory encoding and retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide a comprehensive benchmark to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
Agri-CM3: A Chinese Massive Multi-modal, Multi-level Benchmark for Agricultural Understanding and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluations, particularly in multi-level reasoning, making it difficult to identify model limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Agri-CM3 to assess multi-level reasoning in agricultural management by integrating multiple data modalities. |
| Outcome: | The Agri-CM3 benchmark includes 3,939 images and 15,901 multi-level multiple-choice questions with detailed explanations. |
MoKA:Parameter Efficiency Fine-Tuning via Mixture of Kronecker Product Adaption (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular PEFT methods . low-rank update mechanism of LoRA somewhat limits its ability to approximate full-parameter fine-tuning during training process. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that combines Kronecker product with the Mixture-of-Experts method to achieve parameter efficiency and better model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the GLUE benchmark and instruction tuning tasks for large language models. |
MTAG: Modal-Temporal Attention Graph for Unaligned Human Multimodal Language Sequences (2021.naacl-main)
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Jianing Yang, Yongxin Wang, Ruitao Yi, Yuying Zhu, Azaan Rehman, Amir Zadeh, Soujanya Poria, Louis-Philippe Morency
| Challenge: | a novel graph-based neural model for multimodal sequential data is proposed . fusion is the process of blending information from multiple modalities, usually preceded by alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based neural model that converts unaligned data into a modal-temporal graph . they use a dynamic pruning and read-out technique to efficiently process the graph fusion operation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition benchmarks while utilizing significantly fewer model parameters. |
MASTER: Multi-Agent Security Through Exploration of Roles and Topological Structures - A Comprehensive Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) exhibit remarkable problem-solving and task planning capabilities across diverse domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a security research framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems . they propose corresponding defense strategies to address MAS security risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework amplifies the severity of security risks under MAS attacks . it offers an automated construction process for different MAS setups and an interaction paradigm . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Sparse Teachers Can Be Dense with Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for transferring knowledge from a teacher of large scale to a student of smaller scale are limiting in overall knowledgeableness. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse teacher trick to remove over-parameterized teachers that produce student-unfriendly knowledge and thus limit overall knowledgeableness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trick removes the parameters that result in student-unfriendliness and leads to compelling performance in comparison with baselines. |
Play Guessing Game with LLM: Indirect Jailbreak Attack with Implicit Clues (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks primarily utilize scenario camouflage techniques, however their explicit mention of malicious intent will be easily recognized and defended by LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an indirect jailbreak attack approach, Puzzler, which can bypass LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can bypass the LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, but their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. |
| Approach: | They propose a moral alignment benchmark to test the safety of large language models . they find that models struggle with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to accurately portray morally ambiguous or villainous characters . the model fails most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
EpiGEN: An Efficient Multi-Api Code GENeration Framework under Enterprise Scenario (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models fail to meet expectations for code generation tasks . existing approaches are faced with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework that uses private APIs to pre-train LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows good acceptability and readability on single-GPU tasks compared to fully fine-tuned LLMs with a larger number of parameters. |
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. |
Text Augmented Spatial Aware Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot referring image segmentation methods focus on global-level alignment of image-text pairs, neglecting fine-grained matching between referring sentence and local image regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot referring image segmentation task that is training-free . they use a mask proposal network and a text-augmented spatial-correction score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot referring image segmentation methods. |
EconNLI: Evaluating Large Language Models on Economics Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for writing economic analysis reports or providing financial advice, but their ability to understand economic knowledge and reason about potential results of economic events or actions lacks systematic evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to evaluate LLMs’ knowledge and reasoning abilities in the economic domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates LLMs’ knowledge and reasoning abilities in the economic domain. |
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. |
HiTRANS: A Hierarchical Transformer Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for named entity recognition focus on flat NER, i.e., without nested entities, by sequence labeling methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer network which decomposes the input sentence into multi-grained spans and enhances the representation learning in a hierarchical manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on GENIA, ACE-2004, ace-2005 and NNE datasets. |
Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing image instruction fine-tuning datasets do not fully exploit visual information to enhance multimodal reasoning capabilities of Large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a LLaVA-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K to bridge this gap by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5 and demonstrates enhanced generalizability on the MMMU benchmark. |
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. |
Generating Plausible Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Transformers in Financial Text Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating textual-based explanations are highly implausible and damage a user’s trust in the automated system. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which first applies robust transformer models on a real-world, up-to-date, self-collected mergers and acquisitions dataset and then generates plausible, post-hoc, counterfactual explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves model accuracy and human performance while generating plausible explanations based on human trials. |
AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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Tiankai Yang, Yi Nian, Li Li, Ruiyao Xu, Yuangang Li, Jiaqi Li, Zhuo Xiao, Xiyang Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Kaize Ding, Xia Hu, Yue Zhao
| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates how large language models (LLMs) can help with NLP anomaly detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform zero-shot detection without tasks-specific training, data augmentation and model selection, and it can suggest unsupervised AD models. |
A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection focus on fact-checked reports, resulting in limited coverage and debunking delays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation neural network for explainable fake news detection based on raw reports . they use hierarchical encoders and cascaded selectors to select most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of selected top-K reports based upon raw reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline detection methods and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives. |
OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qiguang Chen, Chengyu Luan, Jiajun Wu, Qiming Yu, Yi Yang, Yizhuo Li, Jingqi Tong, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks for large vision-language models emphasize single-image analysis and fail to exploit contextual information across multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Olympiad-level reasoning when evidence is distributed over multiple images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on bi-image Olympiads and Gemini-3-Pro on multimodal Olympiad-level reasoning tasks. |
An Empirical Study on Multiple Information Sources for Zero-Shot Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Auxiliary information from multiple sources has been demonstrated to be effective in zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) however, there is no comprehensive understanding of how to make better use of the existing information sources and how they affect the performance of ZFET. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source fusion model targeting auxiliary information from multiple sources to improve zero-shot fine-grained entity typing (ZFET) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 11.42% and 22.84% gains over state-of-the-art baselines on BBN and Wiki respectively with regard to macro F1 scores. |
Dialog Intent Induction with Deep Multi-View Clustering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work assumes that dialog intents are expressed in query utterances and captured in the rest of the dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog intent induction task and propose alternating-view k-means for clustering . they split a conversation into two independent views and exploit multi-view clustering techniques . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can induce better dialog intent clusters than state-of-the-art clustering methods. |
Non-Autoregressive Sentence Ordering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentence ordering approaches only leverage unilateral dependencies during decoding and cannot fully explore the semantic dependency between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive ordering network that explores bilateral dependencies between sentences and predicts sentences for each position in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing autoregressive sentence ordering approaches and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. |
Improve Neural Entity Recognition via Multi-Task Data Selection and Constrained Decoding (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Entity recognition is a widely benchmarked task in natural language processing . a neural architecture called BiLSTM-CRF is used to model the language sequences . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture called BiLSTM-CRF to model the language sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art on English entity recognition task and also in other languages. |
Learning Numeracy: A Simple Yet Effective Number Embedding Approach Using Knowledge Graph (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for numeracy-intensive applications fail to learn numerability . existing models fail to handle numbers, resulting in performance problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a number embedding approach that embeds numbers into dimensional space . they construct a knowledge graph consisting of number entities and magnitude relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is easy to implement and shows that it performs well on numeracy-related tasks. |
Syntax-Infused Variational Autoencoder for Text Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the generative superiority of SIVAE on both reconstruction and targeted syntactic evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-infused variational autoencoder that integrates sentences with their syntactic trees to improve the grammar of generated sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the grammar of generated sentences by integrating sentences with syntactic trees. |
Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a single-attribute model with a discriminative model to achieve a combination strategy that incorporates positive correlation and attribute enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is adapted for single-attribute control scenario and achieves surpassing results. |
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. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relationships from texts depend on memory size and replay these memorized samples in subsequent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model to extract relations between entities from texts where the samples of different relations are delivered into the model continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models and avoids catastrophic forgetting. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
What You Say and How You Say It Matters: Predicting Stock Volatility Using Verbal and Vocal Cues (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that textual information in a firm’s financial statement can be used to predict its stock’s risk level. |
| Approach: | They propose to model CEO’s verbal (from text) and vocal (from audio) information in a conference call. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the error rate by comparing CEO’s verbal and vocal information in a conference call with other models. |
Achieving binary weight and activation for LLMs using Post-Training Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantizing large language models suffer from performance degradation when weights are quantized to 1 bit. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training quantization framework with W(1+1)A(14) configuration . they propose utilizing Hessian-aware fine-grained grouping along with an EM-based quantization scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM quantization baselines on W2A4 across multiple tasks. |
Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Chinese idioms are hard to understand by children and non-native speakers due to their non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to rephrase idiom-containing sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence’s meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has better performance than baselines based on the established dataset. |
Buy Tesla, Sell Ford: Assessing Implicit Stock Market Preference in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models such as BERT have been used in many NLP tasks . however, there are still significant differences in their implicit preferences in the stock market . |
| Approach: | They assess the implicit stock market preferences in pretrained language models such as BERT . they find that there are significant differences in preferences between industry sectors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more positive towards the stock market, but there are significant differences between industry sectors or within a sector. |
CLIP: A Dataset for Extracting Action Items for Physicians from Hospital Discharge Notes (2021.acl-long)
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James Mullenbach, Yada Pruksachatkun, Sean Adler, Jennifer Seale, Jordan Swartz, Greg McKelvey, Hui Dai, Yi Yang, David Sontag
| Challenge: | Continuity of care is crucial to ensuring positive health outcomes for patients discharged from an inpatient hospital setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate clinical action items from a dataset of medical notes annotated by physicians and extract them as multi-aspect extractive summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is annotated by physicians and covers 718 documents representing 100K sentences. |
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. |
Non-Autoregressive Math Word Problem Solver with Unified Tree Structure (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MWP solvers do not handle variants that can be derived via mathematical manipulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive solver to present a solution expression and decode it from a given problem description. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solver is able to decode multiple expression variants and correct them . it is based on a unified tree structure and is available on Math23K and MAWPS. |
Predict the Future from the Past? On the Temporal Data Distribution Shift in Financial Sentiment Classifications (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for financial sentiment analysis use random splits of a dataset into training and testing to ensure there is no distribution shift between training and deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines out-of-distribution detection with time series modeling for temporal financial sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model’s ability to adapt to evolving temporal shifts in a volatile financial market. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
KV-Embedding: Training-free Text Embedding via Internal KV Re-routing in Decoder-only LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that decoder-only LLMs can serve as strong embedding backbones when fine-tuned with contrastive objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that activates the latent representation power of frozen LLMs by rerouting the final token's KV states as a prepended prefix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing training-free baselines by 10% on MTEB and maintains robust performance on sequences up to 4,096 tokens. |
Causal-Debias: Unifying Debiasing in Pretrained Language Models and Fine-tuning via Causal Invariant Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove unwanted stereotypical associations from pretrained language models (PLMs) are often focused on removing unwanted stereotypes from PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to remove unwanted stereotypical associations in pretrained language models . they propose bias-relevant factors are causal, while labelrelevant factors causal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces stereotypical associations after PLMs are fine-tuned . the proposed framework mitigates bias from a causal invariant perspective . |
Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems. |
Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, Yinfei Yang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that dual encoders outperform sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
| Approach: | They challenge belief that bottleneck layer is too limited for out-of-domain generalization . they scale up the model while keeping bottleneck as a single dot-product with a fixed size . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
A Survey of Retentive Network (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the effectiveness of the Retentive Networks have not yet been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention mechanism that integrates the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed retention mechanism combines the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models. |
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 . |
FluentSpeech: Stutter-Oriented Automatic Speech Editing with Context-Aware Diffusion Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for speech editing still suffer from over-smoothing problem and lack of robustness due to stutter. |
| Approach: | They propose a stutter-oriented automatic speech editing model that incorporates sutter information into the hidden sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a speech recording dataset . it can improve fluency of stuttering speech in terms of objective and subjective metrics. |
Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus on identifying slots and values, but in reality, customer service agents follow multi-step procedures derived from explicit company policies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fully-labeled dataset to study customer service dialogue systems in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models but still lacks 50.8% absolute accuracy to reach human-level performance on the dataset. |
Exploring the Relationship between In-Context Learning and Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) and Instruction Tuning (IT) are two primary paradigms of adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream applications, but they are significantly different. |
| Approach: | They examine how the hidden states of Large Language Models change in these two paradigms by examining how they differ in implementation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model changes the hidden states of LLMs as if its accompanying demonstrations were used to instructionally tune the model. |
SeDev: Structured Semantic Exploration for LLM-Driven Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in automating code generation, but they suffer from insufficient exploration of the vast solution space. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale LLM-driven code generation framework that efficiently finds high-quality solutions in only a few iterations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while maintaining reasonable time and computational costs. |
Nonparametric Decoding for Generative Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Hyunji Lee, JaeYoung Kim, Hoyeon Chang, Hanseok Oh, Sohee Yang, Vladimir Karpukhin, Yi Lu, Minjoon Seo
| Challenge: | Existing text retrieval models depend on the information encoded in its parameters without external memory, its information capacity is limited and fixed. |
| Approach: | They propose a nonparametric decoding approach which uses external memory instead of vanilla vocab embeddings as decoder voka embedds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can utilize parametric and nonparametric space. |
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 . |
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. |
SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves training efficiency on deduplicated datasets and improves downstream accuracy by 1.77%. |
Simple and Effective Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Structured Nearest Neighbor Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is widely adopted in several domains, such as news, medical, and social media. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot named entity recognition system based on nearest neighbor learning and structured inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves F1 scores on standard few-shot NER evaluation tasks by 6% to 16% relative to previous methods. |
NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task, but its effectiveness in detecting harmful content, phishing attempts, and spam reviews is limited. |
| Approach: | They introduce NLP-ADBench, the most comprehensive NLP anomaly detection benchmark to date . it includes eight curated datasets and 19 state-of-the-art algorithms . |
| Outcome: | The NLP-ADBench benchmark includes 19 state-of-the-art methods and 8 curated datasets . no single model dominates across all datasets, indicating need for automated model selection . |
FLARE: Task-Agnostic Embedding Model Evaluation via Normalizing Flows (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods based on kernel estimators or Gaussian mixtures fail to model high-dimensional distributions effectively, resulting in unstable rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses normalizing flows to estimate information sufficiency in high-dimensional spaces by learning invertible transformations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets show that FLARE achieves a strong Spearman’s (up to 0.90) with supervised benchmarks, remaining robust even for high-dimensional embeddings (d 3,584). |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models. |
Supervised Optimism Correction: Be Confident When LLMs Are Sure (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and medical diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning-based auxiliary loss for Q-value estimations during supervised refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms beam search on GSM8K, MATH, and GAOKAO on reasoning benchmarks. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
Triggerless Backdoor Attack for NLP Tasks with Clean Labels (2022.naacl-main)
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Leilei Gan, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaoya Li, Yuxian Meng, Fei Wu, Yi Yang, Shangwei Guo, Chun Fan
| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a new threat to neural natural language processing models due to the fragility and lack of interpretability of NLP models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to perform backdoor attacks without an external trigger . they propose to use clean-labeled examples to generate poisoned clean-labelled examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is effective and hard to defend due to its triggerless nature. |
Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract crime amounts from fact description and use them to learn distinguishable representations to exploit the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. |
LLM as a metric critic for low resource relation identification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that small language models (SLMs) overfit in low resource situations . however, the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning leads to performance decay . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine large language models and LLM for relation identification by co-evolution . they propose to use a masked language model prompt to generate a relation identification task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle low resource relation identification tasks with minimal overfitting . the proposed model provides essential background knowledge to assist training process . |
DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing ESC data entangles psychological strategies and response content, making it difficult to construct high-quality preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Decoupled ESC framework that decomposes the ESC task into two sequential subtasks: strategy planning and empathic response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines, reducing preference bias and improving response quality. |
Cognitive Alpha Mining via LLM-Driven Code-Based Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to finding effective predictive signals from financial data are limited by their complexity and low signal-to-noise ratio. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. |
VillagerAgent: A Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Coordinating Complex Task Dependencies in Minecraft (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent collaboration using LLMs is a challenging research topic that aims to enable multiple autonomous agents to coordinate their actions and achieve a common goal. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multi-agent collaboration in the Minecraft environment and introduce a Directed Acyclic Graph Multi-Agent Framework to resolve complex inter-ag dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing ModelVerse, reducing hallucinations and improving task decomposition efficacy. |
CMIG: Conceptual Metaphor Theory-Inspired Framework for Metaphorical Image Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image systems often produce visually plausible but semantically literal outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured prompting framework inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory . they propose to identify source–target mappings, filter projectable source attributes and select a visual realization strategy in a reproducible reasoning workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves semantic alignment and controllability on metaphor prompts. |
MR-ALIGN: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinming Wang, Jian Xu, Bin Yu, Sheng Lian, yi Chen, Boran Wang, Yingjian Zhu, Hongzhu Yi, Hong-Ming Yang, Han Hu, Cheng-Lin Liu, Xu-Yao Zhang
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that quantifies state-transition probabilities along the model’s thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations of four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning. |
Beyond Surface Similarity: Detecting Subtle Semantic Shifts in Financial Narratives (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pretrained embeddings and LLM embeddables fail to discern subtle financial narrative shifts, resulting in a lack of insight for investors and regulators. |
| Approach: | They propose a financial domain-specific NLP task to measure nuanced semantic similarity between pairs of financial narratives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods trained on classic STS tasks and generic LLM embeddings on a human-annotated dataset. |
Measuring Human Contribution in AI-Assisted Content Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yueqi Xie, Tao Qi, Jingwei Yi, Xiyuan Yang, Ryan Whalen, Junming Huang, Qian Ding, Yu Xie, Xing Xie, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | generative AI has created a new way to generate content with humans . varying degrees of human contribution in content generation poses significant challenges for the delineation of originality . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure human contribution in AI-assisted content generation by calculating mutual information between human input and AI-aided output relative to self-information of AI-assist output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure discriminates between varying degrees of human contribution across multiple creative domains and is validated in real-world applications. |
Connecting the Dots: Inferring Patent Phrase Similarity with Retrieved Phrase Graphs (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for inferring patent phrase similarity do not perform satisfactorily . et al., 2010: patents are pivotal to innovation, safeguarding novel ideas . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-augmented approach to amplify patent phrase contextual information . they construct a phrase graph that links to patents cited by or cited in patents for each phrase . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the representation of patent phrases in a self-supervised fashion. |
WebSynthesis: World Model-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for Efficient WebAgent Trajectory Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled increasingly capable web agents . however, training such agents at scale still relies on high-quality interaction trajectories that are difficult to obtain at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scalable trajectory synthesis that simulates state transitions without network dependencies and integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search to enable reversible exploration over the simulated state space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebArena, WebVoyager, and Mind2Web-Online show that agents trained exclusively on synthesized trajectories outperform those trained on real-world data. |
Sparse Rewards Can Self-Train Dialogue Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been driven by supervised fine-tuning and high-quality human feedback. however, acquiring meaningful human feedback has become increasingly challenging and costly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that empowers LLM agents to enhance their performance without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves tool-based interactions while preserving general model capabilities across diverse benchmarks. |
A Semi-Markov Structured Support Vector Machine Model for High-Precision Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the backbone of many NLP solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural semi-Markov structured support vector machine model that controls the precision-recall trade-off by assigning weights to different types of errors in the loss-augmented inference during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better precision-recall trade-off at various precision levels. |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
mABC: Multi-Agent Blockchain-inspired Collaboration for Root Cause Analysis in Micro-Services Architecture (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Wei Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Jian Yang, Zhoujin Tian, Yi Zhang, Yan Chaoran, Zhoujun Li, Tongliang Li, Xu Shi, Liangfan Zheng, Bo Zhang
| Challenge: | Root cause analysis (RCA) in Micro-services architectures with escalating complexity is challenging due to fault propagation and circular dependencies among nodes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where multiple agents follow Agent Workflow and collaborate in blockchain-inspired voting to ensure the reliability of root cause analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of steps and standardizes task processing through Agent Workflow. |
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. |
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. |
FlattenQuant: Breaking through the Inference Compute-bound for Large Language Models with Per-tensor Quantization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracies across tasks, but their latency and GPU memory consumption limit their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which flattens the tensor to achieve low bit per-tensori quantization with minimal accuracy loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves low bit per-tensor quantization with minimal accuracy loss. |
Enhancing Hallucination Detection through Perturbation-Based Synthetic Data Generation in System Responses (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are expensive and outdated . despite the popularity of LLMs, the issue of hallucinosity poses significant concerns for downstream users. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically generates both faithful and hallucinated outputs by rewriting system responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot detectors and existing synthetic generation methods in accuracy and latency. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
LBLLM: Lightweight Binarization of Large Language Models via Three-Stage Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implementing large language models are limited by high computational and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on W2A4 quantization settings across languages. |
Learning to Leverage High-Order Medical Knowledge Graph for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical terms are difficult to understand and relations between medical entities become complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage medical domain knowledge for extracting entities and relations for Chinese medical texts by building a heterogeneous graph based on medical knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than state-of-the-art methods on real Chinese medical texts. |
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. |
Seq2Path: Generating Sentiment Tuples as Paths of a Tree (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods for extracting sentiment tuples do not have orders between the t-uples . a novel parallel generative framework for ABSA is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel generative framework to generate sentiment tuples as paths of a tree . they train the model with an independent target and introduce a discriminative token . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on AOPE, ASTE, TASD, UABSA, ACOS . it trains with the loss of ordinary Seq2Seq averaged over paths, and inferences automatically select valid paths. |
Investigating Human and LLMs’ Decisions in Unverifiable Environments: A Case Study with GitHub Activity Overview (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | examining the behaviors of Large Language Models as artificial social actors is underexplored, especially in unverifiable scenarios where conventional benchmarking has little to help improve their abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to collect, compare, and reason about human and LLMs' decisions in an unverifiable scenario and use it to examine their behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compared human and LLM decisions in an unverifiable scenario on GitHub and found that proprietary LLMs behave more like humans than open-source LLM systems. |
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words? An Empirical Study of Aggregation Strategies for Visual Financial Document Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual RAG is an alternative to traditional RAG, but it requires hundreds of patch tokens per document to retrieve and store information. |
| Approach: | They propose to aggregate documents into a single vector to avoid semantic loss . they find global texture dominance is the root cause of this loss - they say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that aggregation obscures semantic changes in financial documents . global texture dominance is the root cause, and the model scales are consistent across models and embeddings. |
SPARK: Simulating the Co-evolution of Stance and Topic Dynamics in Online Discourse with LLM-based Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for topic evolution and stance dynamics is needed to understand online discourse . topic evolution is central to understanding fragmentation of debates, spread of misinformation . |
| Approach: | They propose a stance and topic evolution reasoning framework for co-evolution of topics and stances through natural language interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures key empirical patterns across five real-world domains. |
FragRel: Exploiting Fragment-level Relations in the External Memory of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to process contexts with unlimited length are limited to finite expansion length or prone to performance degradation when dealing with very long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit fragment-level relations in external memory to hierarchically process the long text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves story understanding, repository-level code generation, and long-term chatting. |
Automated Tone Transcription and Clustering with Tone2Vec (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Lexical tones play a crucial role in Sino-Tibetan languages, but current phonetic fieldwork relies on manual effort. |
| Approach: | They propose a pitch-based similarity representations for tone transcription called Tone2Vec . they propose an open-source package that facilitates automated fieldwork and analysis . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on dialect clustering and variance show that Tone2Vec captures fine-grained tone variation. |
Know the Unknown: An Uncertainty-Sensitive Method for LLM Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but face significant challenges from hallucinations, which arise from insufficient knowledge or context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel two-stage approach for contextual question answering that enhances LLMs’ ability to recognise their knowledge boundaries while the second reinforces instruction adherence through carefully designed causal prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces incorrect answers in contextual QA and improves models’ faithfulness to parametric knowledge, mitigating hallucinations in general QA tasks. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Hongyi Wu, Xinshu Shen, Peimin Yu, Gaowei Yi, Xinhao Chen, Tu Hu, Yang Chen, Yupei Ren, Yadong Zhang, Youqi Song, Binxuan Liu, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing research on Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TOREE to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays to improve automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs. |
Transformer-based Speech Model Learns Well as Infants and Encodes Abstractions through Exemplars in the Poverty of the Stimulus Environment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing theories of language learning for infants are inadequate, according to Chomsky . infants learn language in impoverished environments, according a new study . |
| Approach: | They designed a series of tasks, scenarios, and metrics to simulate the POS . they found that the emerging speech model wav2vec2.0 can learn well in noisy Mandarin environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn in noisy and sparse Mandarin environments. |
MathFlow: Enhancing the Perceptual Flow of MLLMs for Visual Mathematical Problems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit significant limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing MLLMs exhibit limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. |