Papers by Yao Lu

47 papers
Discrete Optimization for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization with Word-Level Extraction (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Sentence summarization systems that use latent space to reconstruct the source sentence are unwillingly exploited.
Approach: They propose a method that uses language modeling and semantic similarity metrics to find a high-scoring summary.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art for unsupervised sentence summarization according to ROUGE scores.
From Isolated Scoring to Collaborative Ranking: A Comparison-Native Framework for LLM-Based Paper Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are currently used to evaluate scientific papers by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently.
Approach: They propose a comparison-native framework for paper evaluation that integrates comparison into both data construction and model learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves an average relative improvement of 21.8% over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets.
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows.
Approach: They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution.
Outcome: Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution .
DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profiles (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models are ideal for decision-making, but they can be difficult to process when they are verbose and include repetition, hedging, and vagueness.
Approach: They propose a framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios and integrates them with analogical reasoning to guide LLMs in making decisions in new situations.
Outcome: The proposed framework separates the tasks of quantifying uncertainty and incorporating it into LLM decision-making.
SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales.
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: CKnowEdit is the first-ever knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models.
Approach: They propose a Chinese knowledge editing dataset to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset highlights the challenges that LLMs face in mastering Chinese . CKnowEdit can correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Chinese, the authors show .
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions.
Approach: They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% .
Leveraging Outline-Optimized Generative Interactions and Critique for Self-Refining Outlines with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Logic-RL is a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning.
Approach: They propose a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on FreshWiki and WikiOutline . it can be iteratively applied, with improved quality continuing through three refinement rounds before diminishing returns.
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: i-Code V2 is one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data.
Approach: They propose to create a model that can generate natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data.
Outcome: i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks.
Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multi-XScience is a dataset construction protocol that favours abstractive modeling approaches.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multi-document summarization dataset that is based on articles and lexical databases and WordNet synonymy information to generate related-work sections of a paper.
Outcome: The proposed method is based on lexical databases and WordNet synonymy information to write related work sections of a paper based upon their abstract and the articles they reference.
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities.
Approach: They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge.
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)

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Challenge: Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs.
Approach: They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction.
Outcome: The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI.
The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research suggests that multilingual large language models can achieve impressive cross-lingual understanding despite largely monolingual pretraining.
Approach: They compare a monolingual-only corpus with a standard web corpus that removes all multilingual documents and then retrain the models from scratch under controlled conditions.
Outcome: The results show that removing bilingual data causes translation performance to drop 56% in BLEU, whereas code-switching contributes minimally.
Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Systematic Study of Incomplete Learning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous in large language models . authors identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies within SFT data, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns.
Approach: They propose a diagnostic-first framework that maps incomplete learning to causes . they identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns.
Outcome: The proposed framework maps incomplete learning to causes using observable training and inference signals.
Natural Language Generation for Effective Knowledge Distillation (D19-61)

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Challenge: Knowledge distillation can transfer knowledge from deep language representation models to shallow word embedding-based neural networks.
Approach: They propose to build an unlabeled transfer dataset to enable effective knowledge transfer . they hypothesize that this principled, general approach outperforms rule-based techniques .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms OpenAI GPT on four datasets in sentiment classification, sentence similarity, and linguistic acceptability.
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images .
Approach: They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a .
Outcome: The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images.
SynC-LLM: Generation of Large-Scale Synthetic Circuit Code with Hierarchical Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent years, AI-assisted integrated circuit design methods have shown great potential in boosting IC design efficiency. however, this emerging technique is limited by the serious scarcity of publicly accessible large-scale circuit design data, which are mostly private IPs owned by semiconductor companies.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical framework that exploits LLM's ability to generate new large-scale synthetic digital circuits by learning sequential logic skeletons and annotating function descriptions.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates large-scale synthetic circuits that are valid and fully functional, and can significantly improve AI models’ performance in multiple IC design tasks.
IntactKV: Improving Large Language Model Quantization by Keeping Pivot Tokens Intact (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing quantization methods are compromising performance of large language models (LLMs) despite their high computational intensity, LLMs are still demanding intensive computation.
Approach: They propose to generate the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model.
Outcome: The proposed method generates the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model with no extra inference overhead.
Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing efficient reasoning methods rely on explicit length penalties for excessive verbosity on simple queries.
Approach: They propose a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens . they find length shift occurs when models generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs - a phenomenon that is often unexplored .
Outcome: The proposed method reduces inference token usage by 78% while increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpasses state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods.
Beyond Labels: Empowering Human Annotators with Natural Language Explanations through a Novel Active-Learning Architecture (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing low-resource learning techniques focus on label annotation while neglecting the natural language explanation of a data point.
Approach: They propose a novel architecture that leverages an explanation-generation model to produce explanations guided by human explanations and a prediction model that utilizes generated explanations toward prediction faithfully.
Outcome: The proposed architecture produces explanations guided by human explanations, a prediction model that utilizes generated explanations toward prediction faithfully, and a data diversity-based AL sampling strategy that benefits from the explanation annotations.
Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large pretrained language models can generate text classification results that match fully supervised models.
Approach: They propose to use a few sample training to determine which permutations are performant . they use generative language models to construct an artificial development set .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms fully-supervised models in eleven text classification tasks.
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities.
Approach: They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention.
Reason Only When Needed: Efficient Generative Reward Modeling via Model-Internal Uncertainty (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to generating reward models rely on voting-based mechanisms to evaluate CoT outputs.
Approach: They propose an efficient generative reward modeling framework grounded in model-internal uncertainty.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces inference cost while improving answer accuracy.
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)

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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.
Iterative Refinement of Project-Level Code Context for Precise Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate code for given contexts, such as incomplete code, class, data structure, or project-specific information.
Approach: They propose a compiler feedback-based code generation approach that leverages static analysis to identify mismatches between the generated code and the project's context.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms retrieval-based code generation baselines and significantly outperfies the existing large language models.
UniGeM: Unifying Data Selection and Mixing via Geometric Exploration and Mining (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) scaling is limited by data quality and domain mixing and instance selection are two separate problems.
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies mixing and selection without training proxy models or relying on external reference datasets.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 2.0 data efficiency over a random baseline and further improves overall performance compared to SOTA methods in reasoning-heavy evaluations and multilingual generalization.
LLMs for Now, Fine-Tuning for Later: An Ensemble Approach to Data Drift in Domain-Specific Tasks (2026.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Deploying machine learning models in domain-specific scenarios is challenged by data drift and the scarcity of expert annotations.
Approach: They propose a system that combines an LLM, an AL-assisted compact model and an automatic switch module to assist the active learning process.
Outcome: The proposed system achieves 96–98% switch accuracy and outperforms both models used alone.
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current diffusion models do not cover recent models, thus we curate three test sets for evaluation.
Approach: They propose a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of images bootstrapped from existing image-pair perceptual distances.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms nine baselines by 18 points in accuracy and matches graded human judgements 78% of the time.
ChildTalk: A Multi-Dialect Chinese Child Speech Corpus with Full-Length Child–Caregiver Conversations for Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children remains challenging due to developmental variability and the scarcity of high-quality corpora.
Approach: They propose a large-scale Chinese child speech corpus that contains 112.5 hours of speech from 498 children and 500 caregivers.
Outcome: The proposed model improves in-domain and cross-domain performance on children's speech.
Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent research shows that LLM Agents can generate “believable” human behaviors via prompt-only methods, leaving open questions of whether they can accurately generate step-by-step actions in multi-turn interaction tasks.
Approach: They propose to use shopping data to evaluate LLMs' ability to accurately generate step-by-step actions in a multi-turn interaction task.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 17.26% action generation accuracy and 33.86% F1 score on final purchase prediction, representing improvements of 5.4% and 13.85% over baselines.
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have focused on scaling multilingual machine translation models and evaluation data to hundreds of languages, including multiple under-resourced languages.
Approach: They propose to use n-gram matching metrics to measure progress in multilingual machine translation to 13 typologically diverse African languages to create high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines.
Outcome: The proposed metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments than n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU and METEOR.
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems.
Approach: They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success.
Outcome: Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models.
MoDification: Mixture of Depths Made Easy (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Long-context efficiency is a trending topic in large language model (LLM) serving.
Approach: They propose a method to combine long-context efficiency and mixture of depths to bring down both latency and memory.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 1.2 speedup in latency and 1.8 reduction in memory compared to original LLMs especially in long-context applications.
MoleculeQA: A Dataset to Evaluate Factual Accuracy in Molecular Comprehension (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models generate erroneous information and evaluations fail to assess factual correctness of models.
Approach: They propose to use MoleculeQA to evaluate molecular factual correctness in large language models by organizing molecules into a taxonomy and building QA pairs through human and LLM efforts.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the factual correctness of generated information and enables the development of new models.
Mementos: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Model Reasoning over Image Sequences (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling a variety of visual-language tasks, but their ability to extrapolate from image sequences has been less investigated.
Approach: They propose a new benchmark to assess MLLMs’ sequential image reasoning abilities.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark features 4,761 diverse image sequences with varying lengths.
Libra-VLA: Achieving Learning Equilibrium via Asynchronous Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Vision-Language-Action models ground high-level semantic instructions into executable physical actions.
Approach: They propose a Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System VLA architecture that decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy.
Outcome: The proposed architecture decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy.
More Samples or More Prompts? Exploring Effective Few-Shot In-Context Learning for LLMs with In-Context Sampling (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on LLM prompting focus on selecting a better set of data samples inside one single prompt input, but why not design and leverage multiple ICL prompts together to further improve the LLM’s performance?
Approach: They propose a low-resource LLM prompting technique to optimize the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs to produce confident predictions.
Outcome: The proposed technique can produce confident predictions by optimizing the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs on four NLI datasets and one QA dataset.
Multilingual Language Model Pretraining using Machine-translated Data (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for collecting and filtering multilingual web data lead to most languages lagging behind English performance due to the Internet's English-centric nature.
Approach: They propose to translate a high-quality English web corpus into nine languages and pretrain a 1.3B-parameter model on it.
Outcome: The proposed model matches or outperforms multilingual LLMs of similar size across Non-English understanding and reasoning tasks despite being trained on an order of magnitude less data.
OkraLong: A Flexible Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Long-Text Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a new framework for large language models addresses long-text questions . context compression and dynamic retrieval loops sacrifice critical details or incur iterative costs .
Approach: a new framework is proposed to optimize the entire processing workflow . it uses synergistic components to analyzer, organizer and executor to optimize workflow a .
Outcome: OkraLong improves answer accuracy by 5.7%-41.2% and saves 1.3x-4.7x .
Beyond the Context Window: Scaling Agentic RL via End-to-end Optimized Context Compression (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing reinforcement learning pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and strict context limits.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use where context length quickly becomes a bottleneck.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines.
Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterization (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance on various tasks.
Approach: They propose a decomposed prompt tuning approach that utilizes low-rank matrices to initialize the soft prompt.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining effectiveness.
D4: a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chat (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing human-machine dialogue systems are not able to provide diagnostic information for depression diagnosis due to stigma associated with mental illness.
Approach: They propose to construct a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for depression-diagnosis-oriented chat based on clinical depression diagnostic criteria.
Outcome: The proposed system can be used to diagnose depression using a Chinese Dialogue Dataset.
Multi-Agent-as-Judge: Aligning LLM-Agent-Based Automated Evaluation with Multi-Dimensional Human Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluation frameworks are limited by persona descriptions and are not generalizable to other tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that can automatically construct multiple evaluator personas with distinct dimensions from relevant text documents and instantiate LLM agents with the persona.
Outcome: The proposed framework can believably simulate human evaluators . it extracts stakeholders' diverse perspectives from the provided research papers and constructs personas for the agents .
i-Code Studio: A Configurable and Composable Framework for Integrative AI (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for Integrative AI lack flexibility and composability to handle multimodal tasks.
Approach: They propose a configurable framework for Integrative AI that orchestrates multiple pre-trained models to conduct complex multimodal tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves impressive results on zero-shot multimodal tasks . it can communicate and personalize for users, and it can be used in a multimodal agent .
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings.
Approach: They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences.
Outcome: The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications.
Strings from the Library of Babel: Random Sampling as a Strong Baseline for Prompt Optimisation (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent prompt optimisation approaches use the generative nature of language models to produce prompts, even rivaling the performance of human-curated prompts.
Approach: They propose to randomly sample tokens from the model vocabulary as "separators" they show that random separators are competitive baselines, having less than a 1% difference compared to previous self-optimisation methods.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms human-curated prompts in nine text classification tasks and eight language models and has a 40% chance of performing better than human-generated separators.
InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can attain professional-level proficiency in specific domains through fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a multi-modal LLM that aligns molecular structures with natural language via an instruction-tuning approach.
Outcome: InstructMol surpasses existing models and reduces the gap with specialists in drug discovery tasks.

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