Papers by Yao Zhang
RiOT: Efficient Prompt Refinement with Residual Optimization Tree (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization face two challenges: lack of diversity and semantic drift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic prompt optimization that iteratively refines prompts through text gradients and selects the best prompt using perplexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing prompt optimization methods and manual prompting on commonsense, mathematical, logical, temporal, and semantic reasoning benchmarks. |
Regret-Now: A Physics-Inspired Regret Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have impressive results in general reasoning tasks, but they still exhibit a lack of dynamic error-correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal reasoning framework that uses the principle of minimum potential energy to model the reasoning process as a dynamic trajectory moving toward a more stable state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows consistent gains over strong baselines on two standard TKGQA benchmarks. |
Jigsaw-Puzzles: From Seeing to Understanding to Reasoning in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models lack spatial reasoning capability, despite their ability to comprehend spatial arrangements and model structural relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate vision-language models' spatial perception, structural understanding, and reasoning capabilities by minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 1,100 carefully curated real-world images with high spatial complexity. |
EcoSafeRAG: Efficient Security through Context Analysis in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defense methods rely on internal knowledge of the model, which conflicts with the design concept of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). |
| Approach: | EcoSafeRAG uses sentence-level processing and bait-guided context diversity detection to identify malicious content . |
| Outcome: | EcoSafeRAG uses sentence-level processing and bait-guided context diversity detection to identify malicious content. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| 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 . |
The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Role of Neutral Words in Language Model Group-Agnostic Debiasing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Junlei Zhou, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, raising ethical concerns, especially about perpetuating stereotypes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates a neutral word semantics-based loss function to alleviate the deterioration of the LMS during debiasing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the deterioration of the Language Modeling Score (LMS) by incorporating a neutral word semantics-based loss function. |
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors. |
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning. |
Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
ProvBench: A Benchmark of Legal Provision Recommendation for Contract Auto-Reviewing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiuxuan Shen, Zhongyuan Jiang, Junsan Zhang, Junxiao Han, Yao Wan, Chengjie Guo, Bingcheng Liu, Jie Wu, Renxiang Li, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Contract review is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly . a benchmark is proposed to detect potential legal conflicts . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for legal provision recommendation and conflict detection for contract auto-reviewing which aims to recommend the legal provisions related to contract clauses and detect possible legal conflicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task recommends legal provisions related to contract clauses and detects legal conflicts. |
LLM-Powered Benchmark Factory: Reliable, Generic, and Efficient (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Jiayi Shi, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Using generic and efficient benchmark generators, human annotators are limited by inefficiency . current benchmark generator methods rely on seed signals, leading to long cycles and high costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs as generic benchmark generators and integrate them as BenchMaker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to human-annotated benchmarks on most metrics. |
What Is Overlap Knowledge in Event Argument Extraction? APE: A Cross-datasets Transfer Learning Model for EAE (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches ignore the overlap knowledge across datasets, preventing models from achieving better performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to divide the EAE knowledge into overlap knowledge across datasets and specific knowledge of the target dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model with a large margin when only ten records are available in the target dataset. |
CachePrune: Teaching LLMs What Not to Follow via KV-Cache Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models exhibit critical vulnerability to indirect prompt injection attacks, where instructions injected within in the prompt context can override the user's intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pruning algorithm that prunes neurons associated with instruction-following during KV cache encoding of the prompt context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces the attack success rate while preserving the model's ability to follow user instructions. |
Exploring Union and Intersection of Visual Regions for Generating Questions, Answers, and Distractors (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate image-related questions, correct answers, or challenge distractors are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to put the spotlight on different image regions to diversify QADs . they propose a framework that generates each QAD based on a recurrent multimodal encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework puts the spotlight on different image regions to diversify QADs. |
TensorOpera Router: A Multi-Model Router for Efficient LLM Inference (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Dimitris Stripelis, Zhaozhuo Xu, Zijian Hu, Alay Shah, Han Jin, Yuhang Yao, Jipeng Zhang, Tong Zhang, Salman Avestimehr, Chaoyang He
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a diverse set of domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-monolithic LLM querying system that seamlessly integrates various LLM experts into a single query interface and dynamically routes incoming queries to the most high-performant expert based on query’s requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves query efficiency by 40% and costs by 30% while maintaining or enhancing model performance by 10%. |
GMH: A General Multi-hop Reasoning Model for KG Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs are incomplete with many facts missing, causing performance bottlenecks in many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general multi-hop reasoning task that can be formulated as a search process and can be extended to long-distance reasoning scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in short and long distance reasoning scenarios. |
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks. |
ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Han Zhu, Wei Kang, Liyong Guo, Zengwei Yao, Fangjun Kuang, Weiji Zhuang, Zhaoqing Li, Zhifeng Han, Dong Zhang, Xin Zhang, Xingchen Song, Lingxuan Ye, Long Lin, Daniel Povey
| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models for dialogue generation suffer from high latency and stability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) zero-shot spoken dialogue generation model based on flow-matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in speech generation due to poor speech intelligibility and turn-taking precision. |
ActionStudio: A Lightweight Framework for Data and Training of Large Action Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jianguo Zhang, Thai Quoc Hoang, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Shiyu Wang, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Weiran Yao, Zhiwei Liu, Juntao Tan, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing infrastructure for efficient agentic data processing and model training remains underdeveloped. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and extensible data and training framework for large action models . they propose to unify diverse agent trajectories using Unified Format 2.0 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows 9 higher throughput than existing frameworks and performs well across public and realistic agent benchmarks. |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
ShifCon: Enhancing Non-Dominant Language Capabilities with a Shift-based Multilingual Contrastive Framework (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyuan Zhang, Chenming Shang, Sizhe Wang, Dongdong Zhang, Yiyao Yu, Feng Yao, Renliang Sun, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experiments show that ShifCon significantly enhances the performance of non-dominant languages due to the imbalance in training data across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shift-based multilingual Contrastive framework that aligns the internal forward process of other languages toward that of the dominant one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance of non-dominant languages, particularly for low-resource ones. |
Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xinglin Wang, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Peiwen Yuan, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies for chain-of-thought reasoning do not exploit prior information about question difficulty. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy called self-consistency to improve reasoning performance by adjusting the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning tasks while achieving comparable performance. |
DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profiles (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Revealing and Mitigating the Local Pattern Shortcuts of Mamba (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Mamba excels in tasks that involve localized key information but faces challenges with tasks that require handling distributed key information. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a global gate module into Mamba to address this problem by adding 4M extra parameters to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms attention-based models on synthetic and synthetic tasks with only 4M extra parameters. |
DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Renjie Pi, Jiahui Gao, Shizhe Diao, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in the field of computer vision have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based object detection paradigm that leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user’s instructions and the visual scene. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. |
Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the law of capacity gap to distill knowledge from a large teacher to a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other language models on a larger scale by using the law of capacity gap inducted from a preliminary study on small-scale (3B) LMs. |
Good Visual Guidance Make A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition and relation extraction suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images are incorporated in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual prefix fusion NeTwork for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction using pluggable visual prefixed visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
EventRAG: Enhancing LLM Generation with Event Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zairun Yang, Yilin Wang, Zhengyan Shi, Yuan Yao, Lei Liang, Keyan Ding, Emine Yilmaz, Huajun Chen, Qiang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text generation often neglect event structures that shape real-world narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structured event semantics with iterative retrieval and inference to enhance text generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on UltraDomain and MultiHopRAG show that the proposed framework outperforms baseline RAG systems in generation effectiveness, logical consistency, and multi-hop reasoning accuracy. |
It is AI’s Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question-Answer Pair Generation for Children’s Story Books (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) techniques are created mainly to answer questions asked by humans, but in educational applications, teachers often need to decide what questions to ask . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fairytale-themed storybook as input to generate QA pairs that can test a student's comprehension skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art QAG baseline systems and builds an interactive story-telling application for the future real-world deployment. |
Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion from Hierarchical Perspective (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require only a few associative triples to complete a relationship. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform data augmentation from two perspectives to solve the FKGC problem by inferring new triple facts from existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a number of existing models. |
Leveraging Dual Process Theory in Language Agent Framework for Real-time Simultaneous Human-AI Collaboration (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shao Zhang, Xihuai Wang, Wenhao Zhang, Chaoran Li, Junru Song, Tingyu Li, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Wen Yao, Weinan Zhang, Xinbing Wang, Ying Wen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in turn-by-turn human-AI collaboration but struggle with simultaneous tasks requiring real-time interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a language agent framework that integrates *System 1* and *System 2* for efficient real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing LLM-based agents and human collaborators by integrating Theory of Mind and asynchronous reflection to infer human intentions and perform reasoning-based autonomous decisions. |
SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xuyang Zhi, Peilun Zhou, Chengqiang Lu, Hang Lv, Yiwei Liang, Rongyang Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hongchao Gu, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| 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. |
Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning . however, the recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, where models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves general capabilities and improves reasoning . it can be applied to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or tuning . |
How do Words Contribute to Sentence Semantics? Revisiting Sentence Embeddings with a Perturbation Method (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on sentence representation learning focus on human annotation, but they neglect the critical property that essential contents should contribute to sentence semantics more than non-essential contents when encoding a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbation method for unsupervised semantic analysis that uses a sentence compression metric to adapt sentence compression datasets for automatic evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture the main semantics of sentences better than several SOTA unsupervised sentence embedding models. |
An Auxiliary Task Boosted Multi-task Learning Method for Service Account Retrieval with Limited Human Annotation (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to service account retrieval have limited human annotation, resulting in labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Auxiliary task Boosted Multi-Task Learning method which introduces multiple auxiliary tasks and enhances the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
Enriching Non-Autoregressive Transformer with Syntactic and Semantic Structures for Neural Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation, but their performance is significantly worse than that of autoregressive counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate syntactic and semantic structures among natural languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer for the task of neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves faster speed and keeps translation quality compared with other models. |
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Juntao Tan, Liangwei Yang, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh R N, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Jianguo Zhang, Weiran Yao, Ming Zhu, Shirley Kokane, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks direct access to such data, making benchmarking difficult due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data pipeline that generates realistic user profiles and private documents and a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to understand personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates realistic user profiles and private documents, enabling PersonaBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to understand personal information. |
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
OptiVerse: A Comprehensive Benchmark towards Optimization Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on Mathematical Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, hindering comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that compares 1,000 curated optimization problems across three difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on hard problems while maintaining 27% accuracy. |
Exploring Model Kinship for Merging Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Model merging has become one of the key technologies for enhancing the capabilities and efficiency of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging strategy that incorporates model kinship to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging strategy can yield better performance on benchmark datasets. |
R³A: Reinforced Reasoning for Relevance Assessment for RAG in User-Generated Content Platforms (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to query–document relevance assessment are limited . ambiguous user intent and asymmetric relevance are challenges for RAG platforms . |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reasoning model for relevance assessment that decomposes query intent into intent inference and evidence grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on offline benchmarks and achieves significant gains in large-scale online A/B testing. |
LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text . |
Modeling Temporal-Modal Entity Graph for Procedural Multimodal Machine Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Procedural Multimodal Documents organize textual instructions and corresponding images step by step. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel temporal-modal entity Graph for comprehending PMDs . they propose encoding and reasoning modules to capture textual and visual entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture textual and visual entities and trace their temporal-modal evolution. |
Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Conversational Concept Flows (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that explicitly modeling concept flows with a large commonsense knowledge graph improves response quality, but there is a gap between the knowledge graph and the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model human conversational concept flows with a commonsense knowledge graph . they extract abundant concepts and relations from natural conversations and build a conversation-aware knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than baselines on a large-scale reddit conversation dataset. |
SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive View (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite the potential of large language models, it is difficult to fully count on them in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model analyzes how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective. |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Yizhou Liu, Yuchen Yan, Jin Ma, Xu Tan, Yao Hu, Daoxin Zhang, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| 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% . |
Using active learning to expand training data for implicit discourse relation recognition (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine semantic relations between text spans are limited in the field of discourse-level relation recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to expand the training data set using the corpus of explicitly-related arguments by arbitrarily dropping the overtly presented discourse connectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model expands the training data set using the corpus of explicitly-related arguments, by arbitrarily dropping the overtly presented discourse connectives. |
Leveraging Outline-Optimized Generative Interactions and Critique for Self-Refining Outlines with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Robust Tool Use via Fission-GRPO: Learning to Recover from Execution Errors (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiwei Zhang, Fei Zhao, Rui Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang, Jiakang Wang, Yao Hu, Shaosheng Cao, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, but they remain brittle in multi-turn execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts execution errors into on-policy corrective supervision within the RL training loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute and overall accuracy by 4.0% on BFCL v4 Multi-Turn. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models suffer from reporting bias, describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text. |
| Approach: | They propose to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities by recalling existing images and synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
On the Abstractiveness of Neural Document Summarization (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that document summarization systems are abstractive . authors suggest that automated summarizing systems could be improved . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pure copy system to verify abstractiveness of document summarization systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces abstractive summaries while being far more efficient. |
DisCal: Distribution-Aware Calibration for Mathematical Reasoning Under Character-Level Noisy Inputs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Cong Gao, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Jun Zhang, Yunbo Cao, Zhunchen Luo, Wen Yao, Guotong Geng, Zhong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for calibration of large reasoning models (LRMs) focus on clean inputs, leaving noise unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence calibration framework for character-level noisy inputs that extracts uncertainty signals from both the empirical answer distribution and the model’s predictive distribution and integrates them via a learned calibrator. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that DisCal outperforms existing calibration methods under noisy inputs, reducing expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 39.21% and improving Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by 31.44%. |
Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Training, Inference, and Failures (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Hu, Jiaqi Gu, Ruxin Wang, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Xiaobao Wu, Jianhui Chen, Muhan Zhang, Liangming Pan
| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that reinforcement learning can elicit intriguing emergent reasoning behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive survey of the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models . they organize findings into three core dimensions: 1) training dynamics, 2) reasoning mechanisms, and 3) unintended behaviors. |
| Outcome: | This paper synthesizes the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models into three dimensions . authors outline a roadmap for future studies including improved interpretability and methodologies . |
Safety is Not Only About Refusal: Reasoning-Enhanced Fine-tuning for Interpretable LLM Safety (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains models to engage in explicit safe reasoning before response . they propose RATIONAL, which allows models to reject harmful prompts while providing meaningful and context-aware responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fine-tunes models to reason about query intent, ethics, and potential harm. |
Fact-Tree Reasoning for N-ary Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) tasks focus on binary facts, but neglect n-ary facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new fact-tree reasoning framework that transforms the question into a fact tree and performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. |
Joint Goal Segmentation and Goal Success Prediction on Multi-Domain Conversations (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metrics to measure the performance of conversational AI assistants are difficult to establish due to their slow nature. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic dialogue evaluation framework that performs goal segmentation and success prediction by adding multi-task learning heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves on-par with human annotation compared to a gold annotation benchmark. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are a fundamental task of natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-text framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) that employs instruction finetuning and auxiliary tasks to enhance the model's understanding of entity types in the overall semantic context of a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Few-Shot NER methods and remains competitive with state-of-the-art NER algorithms. |
A Learning-Exploring Method to Generate Diverse Paraphrases with Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation is of great importance for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate sentences as learning objectives from the learned data distribution and employ reinforcement learning to combine these new learning objectives for model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method gains significant diversity and improves generation quality over state-of-the-art datasets. |
Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion and Key Attribute Tree Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA EM models on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets. |
Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Heda Wang, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that disperses model attention from the query . they propose 'focus' search strategy that uses model perplexity to ensure sufficient attention . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations. |
MOBA-E2C: Generating MOBA Game Commentaries via Capturing Highlight Events from the Meta-Data (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e-sports game competitions lack commentators because of the shortage of professional human commentators. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven MOBA commentary generation framework for MOBA games . they use a rule-based generator and a generative GPT generator to generate commentaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates commentaries based on the game meta-data and a rule-based generator and generative GPT generator. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| 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. |
Walking in Others’ Shoes: How Perspective-Taking Guides Large Language Models in Reducing Toxicity and Bias (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods that require white-box access to the model or substantial training fail to simultaneously lessen toxicity and bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that encourages LLMs to integrate diverse human perspectives and self-regulate their responses by incorporating diverse human viewpoints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can significantly diminish toxicity (up to 89%) and bias (up 73%) in LLMs’ responses. |
InsBank: Evolving Instruction Subset for Ongoing Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiayi Shi, Yiwei Li, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Huan Ren, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Recent studies emphasize that quality and diversity of instruction data are more crucial than quantity, highlighting the need to select diverse, high-quality subsets to reduce training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a continuously updated repository to integrate the latest valuable instruction data with a progressive evolution framework to evolve InsBank over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in InsBank evolution and extracts budget-specific subsets. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognitive framework that enables step-level error detection and self-correction in Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Who When benchmark and delivers consistent gains on AgentErrorBench. |
The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiandong Shao, Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Karin Sevegnani, Pontus Stenetorp, Jianfei Yang, Yao Lu
| 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. |
CARMO: Dynamic Criteria Generation for Context Aware Reward Modelling (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Taneesh Gupta, Shivam Shandilya, Xuchao Zhang, Rahul Madhavan, Supriyo Ghosh, Chetan Bansal, Huaxiu Yao, Saravan Rajmohan
| Challenge: | Reward modeling in large language models is susceptible to reward hacking . flawed reward signals often lead to outputs that optimize for spurious correlates . |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that generates dynamic, context-relevant criteria to ground the reward model prior to producing reward scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates dynamic, context-relevant criteria to ground the model prior to producing reward scores. |
PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce memory usage for large language models neglect inter-layer dependency between layers and huge memory consumption in pre-computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compresses the KV cache by layer-wise retaining crucial context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage by layer-wise retaining crucial context . it can improve 2.2x throughput compared to Accelerate with over 54% memory reduction . |
Domain Transfer based Data Augmentation for Neural Query Translation (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Query translation (QT) is a critical factor in successful cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend query translation (QT) with a domain transfer procedure to revise synthetic candidates to search-aware examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and domain transfer methods on translation quality and retrieval accuracy. |
Knowledge Rumination for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained language models lack the capacity to handle knowledge-intensive tasks alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to help pre-trained language models utilize latent knowledge without retrieving it from external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can be applied to pre-trained language models without retrieving external knowledge from the corpus. |
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. |
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets. |
Improving Meta-learning for Low-resource Text Classification and Generation via Memory Imitation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yingxiu Zhao, Zhiliang Tian, Huaxiu Yao, Yinhe Zheng, Dongkyu Lee, Yiping Song, Jian Sun, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Building models of natural language processing (NLP) is challenging in low-resource scenarios where limited data are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory imitation meta-learning method that enhances the model’s reliance on support sets for task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on both text classification and generation tasks. |
Towards Better Graph-based Cross-document Relation Extraction via Non-bridge Entity Enhancement and Prediction Debiasing (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on relation extraction ignore non-bridge entities, leading to bias during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based cross-document Relation Extraction model with non-bridge entity enhancement and prediction debiasing that integrates non-cross entities with target entities and bridge entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on open and closed datasets. |
AdaptiveK: Complexity-Driven Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Language Model Representations (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decomposing model activations into interpretable features fail to account for input complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically adjusts sparsity levels based on the semantic complexity of each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms fixed-sparsity approaches on reconstruction fidelity, explained variance, cosine similarity and interpretability metrics while eliminating the burden of extensive hyperparameter tuning. |
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Benlu Wang, Iris Xia, Yifan Zhang, Junda Wang, null Feiyun Ouyang, Shuo Han, Arman Cohan, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of large language models on medical benchmarks from 16.35% to 53.19%. |
Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Yao, Bowen Dong, Ao Zhang, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Leyu Lin, Maosong Sun, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning framework that reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on text classification and question answering tasks and prevents unstable tuning problems in low-resource settings. |
From Multimodal LLM to Human-level AI: Modality, Instruction, Reasoning, Efficiency and beyond (2024.lrec-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to deliver a comprehensive review of cutting-edge research in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML in learning and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | This course will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML models on learning, learning, and multimodal reasoning. |
Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are not immune to issues of factual accuracy or logically consistent. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will present cutting-edge methods and practical tools for editing Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The aim of this course is to familiarize researchers with the latest advancements and emerging strategies in the realm of knowledge editing for LLMs. |
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Junjie Gao, Jiale Cheng, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Shuntian Yao, Dan Zhang, Jinhua Du, Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages. |
PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances on self-supervised learning have led to powerful vision-language pre-training models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework that reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks and also improves on position insensitive tasks. |
The Role of Visual Modality in Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Challenges and Insights (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yufang Liu, Yao Du, Tao Ji, Jianing Wang, Yang Liu, Yuanbin Wu, Aimin Zhou, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing models that leverage visual information do not improve math reasoning performance . authors suggest that visual information is important for multimodal reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to require image reliance for problem-solving and challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Fei Zhao, Chengqiang Lu, Yufan Shen, Qimeng Wang, Yicheng Qian, Haoxin Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Zhen Wu, Shangyu Xing, Xinyu Dai
| 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. |
Fix-Filter-Fix: Intuitively Connect Any Models for Effective Bug Fixing (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for bug fixing lack generality and use only textual or structured information. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive yet effective general framework called Fix-Filter-Fix for bug fixing that connects models with their filter mechanism to filter out the last model’s unchanged fix to the next. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can quantify and accurately calculate the lifting effect of the model. |
MMDEND: Dendrite-Inspired Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Neuron for Sequence Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kexin Wang, Yuhong Chou, Di Shang, Shijie Mei, Jiahong Zhang, Yanbin Huang, Man Yao, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
| Challenge: | Vanilla spiking neurons are simplified from complex biological neurons with dendrites, soma, and synapses into single somatic compartments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch, multi-compartment parallel spiking dendritic neuron with a proportion-adjustable multi-branched structure that enables long-term temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better long-sequence modeling capability with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption. |
SceneLM: 3D-Aware Language Models for Editable 3D Scene Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for synthesising 3D scenes from a single image are text-driven and lack precise metric understanding from images. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-model-based framework that grounds 3D scene synthesis in visual evidence by recovering an executable metric 3D layout directly from a single image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers an executable metric 3D layout directly from an RGB image and instantiates, places, and edits objects for iterative refinement. |
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
CaKE: Circuit-aware Editing Enables Generalizable Knowledge Learners (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods fail to generalize updates to multi-hop reasoning tasks . Existing methods only edit single or a few model layers, inadequately integrate updated knowledge into reasoning pathways. |
| Approach: | They propose a circuit-aware method that enhances the effective integration of updated knowledge in large language models by leveraging curated data samples guided by their analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy of 20% on the MQuAKE dataset while requiring less memory. |
Representation Learning with Ordered Relation Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are incomplete and lack the order of relations in paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which takes relation paths into account but ignores order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
AttnPO: Attention-Guided Process Supervision for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shuaiyi Nie, null Dingsiyu, Wenyuan Zhang, Linhao Yu, Tianmeng Yang, Yao Chen, Weichong Yin, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing trajectory-level length penalties fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they treat all reasoning steps uniformly and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length while improving performance across 9 benchmarks. |
Towards Tracing Trustworthiness Dynamics: Revisiting Pre-training Period of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on pre-trained LLMs to better understand and improve their trustworthiness. |
| Approach: | They apply linear probing to LLMs to explore five key dimensions of trustworthiness: reliability, privacy, toxicity, fairness, and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish concepts in each trustworthiness dimension, suggesting that it can be trained in early pre-training. |
Think-Search-Patch: A Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Framework for Repository-Level Code Repair (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Bojian Xiong, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Shaowei Zhang, Pengyun Zhu, Yan Liu, Yongqi Leng, Ling Shi, Meizhi Zhong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from multiple-file coding scenarios with strong inter-file dependencies . experimental results show that large language models exhibit inadequate performance in multi-file scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for repository-level code repair . they use a dataset to generate standardized patches based on the key snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and repair success on SWE-bench Lite . it surpasses models with larger size in managing extensive code contexts and fixing bugs spanning across multiple files. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
Invisible Entropy: Towards Safe and Efficient Low-Entropy LLM Watermarking (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to watermark low-entropy content are expensive and risky . IE reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a logit-based watermarking paradigm that uses entropy-based features to predict whether the next token is high or low. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods. |
Awakening Augmented Generation: Learning to Awaken Internal Knowledge of Large Language Models for Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that Large Language Models model rich knowledge, but it is often not activated and awakened. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages richer context to enhance question answering . Explicit awakening fine-tunes a context generator to create a synthetic, compressed document that functions as symbolic context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics the human ability to answer questions using only thinking and recalling to compensate for knowledge gaps. |
Beyond Single-Value Metrics: Evaluating and Enhancing LLM Unlearning with Cognitive Diagnosis (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yicheng Lang, Kehan Guo, Yue Huang, Yujun Zhou, Haomin Zhuang, Tianyu Yang, Yao Su, Xiangliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to remove harmful knowledge and undesirable capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Cognitive Diagnosis Modeling to evaluate LLM unlearning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances evaluation and facilitates removal of harmful abilities. |
Reasoning with Language Model Prompting: A Survey (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shuofei Qiao, Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Reasoning is an essential ability for complex problem-solving and can provide back-end support for various real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They present cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting and provide systematic resources to help beginners. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches have not been systematically reviewed and analyzed. |
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups. |
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) are used for personalized federated learning . communication costs are high with large PLMs, and local training is expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for federated learning with pretrained language models . they propose 'discrete local search' and compression mechanism for local training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines. |
KeFVP: Knowledge-enhanced Financial Volatility Prediction (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current studies ignore the role of financial metrics knowledge in earnings calls and little consideration is given to integrating text and price information. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate financial metrics knowledge into text comprehension by knowledge-enhanced adaptive pre-training and effectively incorporating text and price information by introducing a conditional time series prediction module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world datasets and is effective and reliable. |
Your Language Model May Think Too Rigidly: Achieving Reasoning Consistency with Symmetry-Enhanced Training (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Miao Li, William Han, Yuyou Zhang, Emerson Liu, Zuxin Liu, Chuang Gan, Ding Zhao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that enhances LLMs’ awareness of symmetry in query variations and propose syMmetry-ENhanceD (MEND) data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on logical and arithmetic reasoning tasks show that the proposed approach improves model robustness at the knowledge extraction stage through query augmentation. |
Can LLMs Hear the Dogwhistle? (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Liu, Yi Lin, Xinwei Guo, Ziwei Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Haiyan Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Existing safety benchmarks focus on explicitly harmful content, but ignore context-dependent expressions such as dogwhistles. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating LLM safety under dogwhistle-driven prompts . their findings expose a blind spot in current safety evaluation practices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared safety performance with toxic terms using dogwhistle-driven prompts. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| 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. |
MSIA: Adaptive Medical Multimodal Multi-turn Semantic Jailbreak (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical large language models exhibit high domain specificity and condensed semantics, making them vulnerable to diagnostic errors in real-world clinical settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for modeling and inducing multi-turn medical semantic jailbreaks in clinical dialogues. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on chest X-ray-based multimodal medical dialogues show that MSIA outperforms existing jailbreak methods with an average success rate of 76.67%. |
SimpleOCR: Rendering Visual Questions to Teach MLLMs to Read (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yibo Peng, Peng Xia, Ding Zhong, Kaide Zeng, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Jiaqi Liu, Ruiyi Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | MLLMs lack visual grounding mechanism to read text embedded in images, or rely on parametric shortcuts . despite strong OCR capabilities, models suffer performance degradation of 12.7% in the VQ setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play training strategy that invalidates shortcuts in text prompts . they propose 'vq' setting where text queries are rendered directly onto images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy surpasses the base model by 5.4% and GRPO based on original images by 2.7% on four representative OOD benchmarks. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaohan Wang, Shengyu Mao, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods can modify concept-level definitions, but they can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset ConceptEdit and establish new metrics for evaluation to investigate the editing capability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can modify concept definitions but can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Yueqi Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing efficient methods estimate performance of models on large benchmarks, but these methods rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the MAE of estimates by 31.4% on benchmarks across 300 models. |
Unsupervised Preference-Aware Language Identification (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies do not consider inter-personal variations due to the lack of user annotated training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user preferences to identify ambiguous texts in multilingual applications without user annotated training data to build a preference-aware LID model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing LID systems on handling ambiguous texts. |
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing agentic system generation frameworks lack autonomy, autonomy, and functionality . current frameworks are too rigid, limiting adaptability and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration . they construct agents from scratch and jointly refine functionality and coordination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ADAS on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks on the TravelPlanner benchmark. |
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
FFAEval: Evaluating Dialogue System via Free-For-All Ranking (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems show poor correlation with human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a free-for-all human evaluation framework that shares dialogue history with annotators for multi-turn scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a strong correlation with human assessment on English and Chinese dialogue systems. |
P²Net: Parallel Pointer-based Network for Key Information Extraction with Complex Layouts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiwen Wei, Jie Yao, Jiang Zhong, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Changlong Sun, Xin Zhang, Fengmao Lv, Li Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for key information extraction are based on a limited set of entity categories and fixed layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, human-annotated dataset for key information extraction . it is based on a human-annotated layout and 1,162 entity categories . they propose 'parallel pointer-based network' that leverages implicit relationships . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on widely-used datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining fast inference speeds. |
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Baosong Yang, Haibo Zhang, Xue Zhao, Wenqing Yao, Boxing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework that integrates lexical and syntactical conditions into a text sequence and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can combine lexical and syntactical conditions and improve paraphrase generation. |
Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yunzhi Yao, Peng Wang, Bozhong Tian, Siyuan Cheng, Zhoubo Li, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in model editing for LLMs have created challenges and opportunities for the community. |
| Approach: | They propose to alter the behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alters behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network for Multi-aspect Multi-sentiment Classification (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focus on aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity . current methods focus on sentences with only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously using a heterogeneous graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict sentiments towards the given aspect term in a sentence . it can provide more detailed predictions compared with sentence-level sentiment analysis. |
Eliciting Medical Reasoning with Knowledge-enhanced Data Synthesis: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Approach (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance medical reasoning lack high-quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical knowledge-enhanced data Synthesis and Semi-supervised Reinforcement learning framework that uses rare disease knowledge to synthesize distribution-controllable reasoning questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods across ten medical benchmarks and achieves up to 5.93% gain on rare diseases tasks. |
Iterative Refinement of Project-Level Code Context for Precise Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhangqian Bi, Yao Wan, Zheng Wang, Hongyu Zhang, Batu Guan, Fangxin Lu, Zili Zhang, Yulei Sui, Hai Jin, Xuanhua Shi
| 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. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
Adaptive Structure Induction for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Spectral Perspective (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | incorporating structure information can enhance the performance of aspect-based sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to induct latent structures from a spectrum perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shortens Aspects-sentiment Distance and improves structure induction ability. |
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in multi-step reasoning tasks, yet relying on extensive manual labeling to provide procedural feedback remains a significant impediment. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework that decomposes complex problems into manageable subquestions with a controllable granularity switch and sequentially applies reinforcement learning to iteratively improve the subquest solver. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks over SOTA. |
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
LLMs for Now, Fine-Tuning for Later: An Ensemble Approach to Data Drift in Domain-Specific Tasks (2026.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Lu, Bingsheng Yao, Shao Zhang, Yisi Sang, Yun Wang, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Dakuo Wang
| 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. |
ParetoRAG: Leveraging Sentence-Context Attention for Robust and Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation systems face persistent challenges in retrieval inefficiency and the inability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that optimizes RAG systems through sentence-level refinement guided by the Pareto principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves dual improvements in retrieval precision and generation quality without additional training or API resources while using only 40% of the tokens compared to traditional approaches. |
Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that automatically discovers thinking token patterns with reasoning primitives and curates SFT datasets to prepare LLMs for RL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms baseline methods on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks on RL tasks. |
Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods that require human annotations or training a dedicated data filter to curate high-quality mathematical texts are based on autonomous data selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages base language models as zero-shot "generative classifiers" they use a model's logits to determine whether a given passage is mathematically informative and educational . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly boosts downstream performance on math benchmarks while using far fewer tokens than previous methods. |
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Lixinyu Xu, Yao Lu, Wenyan Li, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
| 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. |
Open Hierarchical Relation Extraction (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing OpenRE methods cast different relation types in isolation without considering their hierarchical dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to establish bidirectional connections between OpenRE and relation hierarchies by integrating hierarchy information into relation representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on relation clustering and hierarchy expansion. |
CausalGaze: Unveiling Hallucinations via Counterfactual Graph Intervention in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing classification-based methods capture noise and spurious correlations while overlooking the underlying causal mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection framework based on structural causal models that captures static and passive signals from internal states and employs counterfactual interventions to disentangle causal reasoning paths from incidental noise. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four datasets and three widely used LLMs show that the proposed framework improves AUROC and interpretability. |
RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing medical large vision language models often generate inaccurate and irrelevant answers that do not align with established medical facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for controlling factuality risk through calibrated selection of the number of retrieved contexts and a preference dataset to fine-tune the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 20.8% on three medical VQA datasets. |
DecEx-RAG: Boosting Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Decision and Execution Optimization via Process Supervision (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yongqi Leng, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Meizhi Zhong, Bojian Xiong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) have shown strong performance, but this approach still suffers from inefficient exploration, sparse reward signals, and ambiguous global reward feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that models RAG as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and introduces an efficient pruning strategy to optimize data expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and achieves an average performance improvement of 6.2% across six datasets. |
From Individual Excellence to Collective Sustainability: Seeking Strategic Equilibrium in Proactive Multi-Agent Teams (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a team of proactive agents suffer from a greedy optimization for immediate task accuracy . a new approach to improve team collaboration is based on the opportunity cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic proactive multi-agent reinforcement learning framework to solve this imbalance . they use a Positive-Unlabeled scorer to anchor intervention quality under sparse supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains high performance while preventing experts from over-developing. |
How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks . however, they struggle with knowledge updates due to dynamic nature of world knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose to identify computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing . they also identify a phase shift from formation to optimization in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture factual knowledge from pre-training corpus and encapsulate it as extensive parametric knowledge. |
Generating Questions, Answers, and Distractors for Videos: Exploring Semantic Uncertainty of Object Motions (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing video QADs are generated using video captions, incurring significant costs and resulting in bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use temporal motion to describe video objects to generate diverse QADs focusing on different objects and interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves consistency and diversity of generated QADs on the NExT-QA and Perception Test benchmarks. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
Efficient Zero-shot Event Extraction with Context-Definition Alignment (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Conventional supervised methods cannot generalize to event types out of the pre-defined ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two separate transformer models to model the definition semantics of an event type name into the same embedding space and then minimize their embeddable distance via contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous zero-shot EE methods with fast inference speed due to the disjoint design. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk): Fast Human Annotation of Dense Image Captions (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing human annotation efforts are limited . et al., 2015) suggest that densely annotated image captions improve vision-language alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-in-the-loop methodology to maximize the number of annotated samples and improve their comprehensiveness under fixed budget constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves annotation speed and retrieval performance over the parallel method. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| 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. |
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for semantic parsing are too small in terms of number of programs for training modern data-intensive models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing task for a database . they use a dataset with 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is different from previous tasks because it uses the same database and program . the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
G-Cap: A Game Character Caption Generator (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) primarily focus on real-world scenarios, leaving surreal, highly stylized, and semantically hybrid virtual-world situations significantly underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a manually annotated benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates LVLMs’ ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world. |
How to Make LMs Strong Node Classifiers? (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhe Xu, Kaveh Hassani, Si Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Michihiro Yasunaga, Limei Wang, Dongqi Fu, Ning Yao, Bo Long, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) are increasingly challenging the dominance of domain-specific models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that empowers off-the-shelf LMs to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the art (SOTA) GNNs on node classification tasks without requiring any architectural modifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing GNNs on node classification tasks and is open-source upon publication. |
MoDification: Mixture of Depths Made Easy (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chen Zhang, Meizhi Zhong, Qimeng Wang, Xuantao Lu, Zheyu Ye, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, Yao Hu, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang, Dawei Song
| 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. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchi Wang, Yishuo Cai, Shuhuai Ren, Sihan Yang, Linli Yao, Yuanxin Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Xu Sun
| Challenge: | Existing recaptioning methods suffer from inaccuracies due to missing fine-grained details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines captions through visual reconstruction using a text-to-image model and a visual reconstruction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on CapsBench and CompreCap by 10%. |
Listening to Patients: Detecting and Mitigating Patient Misreport in Medical Dialogue System (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical Dialogue Systems (MDSs) aim to provide automated healthcare support through natural language interactions between patients and system agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects misreports and mitigates them by generating controlled clarifying questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect misreports and mitigate them through generating controlled clarifying questions. |
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says . |
| Approach: | They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures . |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Understanding the RoPE Extensions of Long-Context LLMs: An Attention Perspective (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Enabling LLMs to handle lengthy context is currently a research hotspot . a notable challenge limiting further customization is the inability of LLM to utilize context beyond pretrained length due to the inherent flaw of rotary position embedding (RoPE). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the RoPE from an attention perspective and on two benchmarking tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of the RoPE improves extrapolation and retrieval errors. |
On Orthogonality Constraints for Transformers (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Aston Zhang, Alvin Chan, Yi Tay, Jie Fu, Shuohang Wang, Shuai Zhang, Huajie Shao, Shuochao Yao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
| Challenge: | a dedicated study on orthogonality constraints for transformers has been lacking . plug-and-play constraints increase the BLEU of transformers . |
| Approach: | They propose to use plug-and-play constraints to encourage matrices to be orthogonal for numerical stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed constraint increases the BLEU on the large-scale WMT’16 EnDe benchmark by a factor of 28.4 to 29.6. |
CMDAG: A Chinese Metaphor Dataset with Annotated Grounds as CoT for Boosting Metaphor Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Metaphors are a prominent linguistic device in human language and literature, as they add color, imagery, and emphasis to enhance effective communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale high quality annotated Chinese Metaphor Corpus . they use a set of guidelines to ensure the accuracy and consistency of their annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus generates metaphors that resonate more with real-world intuition. |
Sign2Vis: Automated Data Visualization from Sign Language (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate natural language descriptions into visualization queries focus on spoken languages, not sign languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a sign language interface that enables the DHH community to engage more fully with data analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface can be used by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. |
M-TRACE: Detecting and Mitigating Time-Anchor Drift via Step-wise Conflict Checking in Temporal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that M-TRACE effectively reduces time-anchor drift . external knowledge may be inaccurate while internal knowledge can become outdated . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent reasoning framework for temporal knowledge conflicts . they propose 'TimeConfQA' which guides conflict-aware final reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that M-TRACE reduces time-anchor drift and improves performance on complex temporal question answering tasks. |
PURE: Aligning LLM via Pluggable Query Reformulation for Enhanced Helpfulness (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) depend on vast amounts of text data sourced from the Internet for their training. |
| Approach: | They propose a new alignment paradigm that reformulates risky queries into highly relevant yet harmless ones before feeding them into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach eliminates the high costs of training base LLMs and achieves a promising balance of harmlessness and helpfulness. |
Different Strokes for Different Folks: Investigating Appropriate Further Pre-training Approaches for Diverse Dialogue Tasks (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models can be fine-tuned on domain-specific unlabeled data . however, most further pre-training works just keep running the conventional pre- training task . |
| Approach: | They propose to add a further pre-training phase to the model to improve downstream tasks . they propose to use a domain-adaptive pre-tuning phase to fine-tune the models on unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multiple task-oriented dialogue downstream tasks. |
Syntactically-Informed Unsupervised Paraphrasing with Non-Parallel Data (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on syntactically controlled paraphrase generation rely on large-scale parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactically-informed unsupervised paraphrasing model based on conditional variational auto-encoder which can generate texts in a specified syntastic structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse paraphrases with specified syntactic structure using non-parallel data. |
Find or Classify? Dual Strategy for Slot-Value Predictions on Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking (2020.starsem-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog state tracking are ontology-based and ontologie-free . however, it is not clear enough which slots are better handled by either of the two methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-strategy model that integrates both ontology-based and ontological-free methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on noisy and cleaner datasets. |
FANS: Formal Answer Selection for LLM Natural Language Math Reasoning Using Lean4 (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that use Lean4 to enhance LLMs' NL reasoning abilities have been controversial in the field of math reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Lean4 to enhance LLMs’ NL math reasoning ability by generating a Lean 4 theorem statement and a proof-generating LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs' NL math reasoning ability by 2% across several math benchmarks and higher further based on reward models or in subfields such as algebra and number theory. |
Well Begun is Half Done: Generator-agnostic Knowledge Pre-Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection methods are costly to learn and difficult to interpret when errors arise in the generated responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-agnostic knowledge selection method to select context-related knowledge among different knowledge structures and variable knowledge requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can select knowledge accurately in advance and reduce learning, adjustment, and interpretation burden of later models. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
Understanding Structured Financial Data with LLMs: A Case Study on Fraud Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive to develop and maintain and require extensive feature engineering to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach that serializes a compact subset of numeric/categorical attributes into natural language and performs retrieval-augmented in-context learning over label-aware, instance-level exemplars. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves F1/MCC over direct prompting and is competitive with strong tabular baselines in several settings. |
Why Do Emotions Change? Appraisal-Guided Reasoning for Emotion–Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn, multi-speaker multimodal affect understanding are difficult to maintain conversation-level consistency under within-speaks' emotion shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines appraisal-guided structured generation with graph-structured reinforcement learning to extract triplets from multi-turn multimodal conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on public MECTEC benchmarks and improves structure-aware metrics on emotion shift coherence and core events. |
Skill Weaving: Efficient LLM Improvement via Modular Skillpacks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can specialize under fixed memory and inference budgets, but they struggle to achieve high performance across heterogeneous domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular improvement framework that partitions full capabilities of a general-purpose model into domain-specific delta modules that reorganize and refine the model's internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms monolithic models on multi-task and agentic benchmarks and achieves up to 4 speedup. |
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factuality detection methods are not effective for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that trains on offline consistency checking results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification and improves on factuality detection and question answering benchmarks. |
MEIT: Multimodal Electrocardiogram Instruction Tuning on Large Language Models for Report Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongwei Wan, Che Liu, Xin Wang, Chaofan Tao, Hui Shen, Jing Xiong, Rossella Arcucci, Huaxiu Yao, Mi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on classifying cardiac conditions using ECG data but have overlooked ECG report generation, which is time-consuming and requires clinical expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multimodal ECG Instruction Tuning framework that extends the capability of large language models (LLMs) for the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source LLMs and LLM backbones across two large-scale ECG datasets. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
CodeIP: A Grammar-Guided Multi-Bit Watermark for Large Language Models of Code (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in code generation, but they also present challenges regarding the protection of Intellectual Property (IP) related to model architectures, weights, and training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bit watermarking technique that embeds additional information to preserve provenance details, such as the vendor ID of an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique preserves provenance details while maintaining syntactical correctness of generated code. |
SWE-Mutation: Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Suites in Software Engineering? (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Sun, Yuze Zhao, Yufeng Wang, Yao Du, Zhiyuan Ma, Jinbo Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Kai Zhang, Zhenya Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating software engineering capabilities is a core component of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-generated test suites that introduces mutated solutions that attempt to "fool" them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suites are based on 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and include a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. |
Bone Soups: A Seek-and-Soup Model Merging Approach for Controllable Multi-Objective Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on merging language models tuned on single objectives . existing approaches ignore the impacts of competing objectives on model tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging approach that seeks a series of backbone models and merges them according to user preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach exhibits strong controllability and Pareto optimality in controllable multi-objective generation. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Random Smooth-based Certified Defense against Text Adversarial Attack (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Textual adversarial examples train models on the worst-case text generated by substituting words in original texts with synonyms, but due to the discrete word embedding representations, the large search space hinders the robust training efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat the word substitution as a continuous perturbation on the word embedding representation and apply random smooth techniques to approximate the word replacement operation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms conventional methods and improves the robustness in training. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
TCSinger 2: Customizable Multilingual Zero-shot Singing Voice Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Dongyu Yao, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ziyue Jiang, Yuhan Wang, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot singing voice synthesis models depend on phoneme and note boundary annotations, limiting their robustness and producing poor transitions between phonemes and notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task multilingual zero-shot SVS model with style transfer and style control based on various prompts. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TCSinger 2 outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective metrics across multiple related tasks. |
More Samples or More Prompts? Exploring Effective Few-Shot In-Context Learning for LLMs with In-Context Sampling (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Bingsheng Yao, Guiming Chen, Ruishi Zou, Yuxuan Lu, Jiachen Li, Shao Zhang, Yisi Sang, Sijia Liu, James Hendler, Dakuo Wang
| 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. |
Pre-training Distillation for Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model for model compression. |
| Approach: | They extend knowledge distillation to the pre-training phase of large language models . they first conduct an experiment using a teacher LLM to distill a 1.9B student LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to distill a 1.9B student model using a teacher LLM. |
Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models through Spectral Modulation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, garnering significant attention from both academia and industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct spectral modulation in the parameter space of LLMs to integrate with various models in a plug-and-play manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance by 10.12% with spectral modulation. |
MPBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark for Process Errors Identification (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
xu Zhao Pan, Pengfei Zhou, Jiaxin Ai, Wangbo Zhao, Kai Wang, Xiaojiang Peng, Wenqi Shao, Hongxun Yao, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks of large language models focus on error detection, neglecting other scenarios like reasoning search. |
| Approach: | et al. propose a multi-task, multimodal benchmark to assess effectiveness of PRMs . step correctness, answers aggregation and reasoning process search are evaluated . ethical principles of MPBench are based on a set of evaluation paradigms based in a text-based benchmark . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios . it uses three evaluation paradigms to assess the effectiveness and compares them with existing models . a the proposed model improves reasoning accuracy by providing stepwise feedback for multi-step reasoning results . |
Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jianguo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenhao Liu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Yao Wan, Philip Yu, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing work on few-shot intent classification without OOS has focused on the few-shot intent classification with out-of-scope intents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BERT-style pairwise encoding to train a binary classifier that estimates the best matched training example for a user input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves more stable and accurate in-domain and OOS detection accuracy than RoBERTa-based classifiers and embedding-based nearest neighbor approaches. |
WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new few-shot LLM-based chatbot is able to provide factual and engaging responses . a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology is used to evaluate the system . |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates . they distill WikiChat into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms retrieval-based and LLM-based systems on the Wikipedia corpus. |
MCPEval: Automatic MCP-based Deep Evaluation for AI Agent Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiwei Liu, Jielin Qiu, Shiyu Wang, Jianguo Zhang, Zuxin Liu, Roshan Ram, Haolin Chen, Weiran Yao, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks suffer from limitations such as static task benchmarks, limited scope, and inadequate integration with practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source, Model Context Protocol-based evaluation framework specifically tailored for comprehensive and systematic assessment of LLM-powered agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uncovers nuanced performance patterns and identify domain-specific strengths and weaknesses, providing valuable insights beyond traditional binary success metrics. |
LLM-as-a-Coauthor: Can Mixed Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text Be Detected? (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Qihui Zhang, Chujie Gao, Dongping Chen, Yue Huang, Yixin Huang, Zhenyang Sun, Shilin Zhang, Weiye Li, Zhengyan Fu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | Current research focuses on purely MGT detection without adequately addressing mixed scenarios including AI-revised Human-Written Text (HWT) and human-revealed MGT. |
| Approach: | They define mixtext, a form of mixed text involving both AI and human-generated content, and then use a MixSet dataset to assess their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detectors struggle to identify mixtext, particularly in dealing with subtle modifications and style adaptability. |
Improving Gradient-based Adversarial Training for Text Classification by Contrastive Learning and Auto-Encoder (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that models can be easily fooled by intentionally designed adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose two efficient approaches for generating adversarial perturbations on embeddings and propose two new approaches to help model learn adversarials more efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches outperform strong baselines on various text classification datasets and the model's performance drops less under adversarial attack. |
Think Both Ways: Teacher-Student Bidirectional Reasoning Enhances MCQ Generation and Distractor Quality (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality MCQs struggle with contextual relevance and plausible distractors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates bidirectional reasoning perspectives to generate contextually relevant questions and plausible distractors while student reasoning evaluates question clarity and the misleading nature of distractors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating text-grounded questions and high-quality distractors for narrative contexts. |
MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely on knowledge distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view fine-tuning method that exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods that rely heavily on LLM teachers . it grants models generalization ability across views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete data. |
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding method exploits consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative decoding method that exploits the consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or databases. |
Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference: Multi-Candidate Optimization for Diverse Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing diverse NMT models lack translation diversity due to a discrepancy between training and inference . despite the success of diverse NTM, there is still a lack of translation diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-candidate optimization framework for diverse NMT to deal with this defect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is transparent to basic diverse NMT models, and universally makes better trade-off between diversity and quality. |
OkraLong: A Flexible Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Long-Text Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
GASim: A Graph-Accelerated Hybrid Framework for Social Simulation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale social simulators require high latency due to expensive memory retrieval and sequential ABM execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-accelerated hybrid multi-agent framework for large-scale social simulations that uses large language models and numerical agent-based models to scale up simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers 9.94 speedup over the traditional framework and consumes less than 20% of tokens. |
Noisy-Labeled NER with Confidence Estimation (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies in deep learning have shown significant progress in named entity recognition (NER) . however, most existing works assume clean data annotation, while real-world data typically involve a large amount of noises. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence estimation approach for named entity recognition using noisy labels using local and global independence assumptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method marginalizes out labels of low confidence with a CRF model and integrates it into a self-training framework for boosting performance. |
Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn sentence embeddings do not capture the semantic similarity of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates compositional sentence operations into the embedding space and optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks. |
Enhancing Code Generation Performance of Smaller Models by Distilling the Reasoning Ability of LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation through the ‘Chain-of-Thought’ prompting technique. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which aims to transfer LLMs’ reasoning capabilities to smaller models through distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the smaller model's code generation performance by over 130% on the APPS benchmark. |
VLM2-Bench: A Closer Look at How Well VLMs Implicitly Link Explicit Matching Visual Cues (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models lack the ability to visually link matching visual cues across images or frames. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess whether vision-language models can Visually Link Matching cues with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks on multiple images and videos do not demonstrate that vision-language models can link visual cues across images or frames. |
Taming Text-to-Image Synthesis for Novices: User-centric Prompt Generation via Multi-turn Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Justin Li, Jian Gao, Zhang Li, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for text-to-image synthesis are sensitive on textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasizes user experience for novice users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emphasizes user experience for novice users . it improves user-centricity score while maintaining a competitive quality of synthesized images. |
HETFORMER: Heterogeneous Transformer with Sparse Attention for Long-Text Extractive Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing semantic graph structure from raw text are cumbersome and inefficient for long-text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based pre-trained model with multi-granularity sparse attentions for long-text extractive summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on single- and multi-document summarization tasks while using less memory and fewer parameters. |
Relation-aware Ensemble Learning for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to explore semantics of knowledge graphs have been proposed to explore these semantics in distinct ways. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage existing methods in relation-aware manner to learn an ensemble by leveraging existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has the same computation cost as general ensemble methods but with much better performance on benchmark datasets. |
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hieu Tran, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Yifan Zhang, Shuo Han, null Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing work aims to improve reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for knowledge-intensive tasks such as medical and commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar) that enhances reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension to the mutual reasoning framework improves reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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%. |
Salience Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Fei Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Hongming Zhang, Lifeng Jin, Sangwoo Cho, Wenlin Yao, Xiaoyang Wang, Muhao Chen, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models implicitly learn to capture the salient information from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization by averaging salient content to a fixed threshold. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily adapted to documents with various abstractiveness and achieves high performance. |
Hybrid Inverted Index Is a Robust Accelerator for Dense Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Inverted file structure is a common technique for accelerating dense retrieval, but its lossy nature degrades it. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid index where embedding clusters and salient terms work collaboratively to accelerate dense retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves lossless retrieval quality with competitive efficiency across index settings. |
Fine-Grained Legal Argument-Pair Extraction via Coarse-Grained Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current methods conceptualize LAE as a supervised sentence-pair classification problem and necessitate extensive manual annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that focuses on fine-grained alignment of argument pairs building upon coarse-grain complaint-defense pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 3.7 and 2.4 points on average. |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
From Discrimination to Generation: Low-Resource Intent Detection with Language Model Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies fine-tune discriminative models on specific defined intent classes, preventing them from being directly adopted to new intent domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained generative intent model to detect new intents from different domains with no parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines that need further fine-tuning or domain-specific samples. |
R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reasoning is a fundamental capability underpinning text-to-image (T2I) generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously assess reasoning-driven T2I generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 16 representative T2I models show limited reasoning performance . a strong pipeline-based framework decouples reasoning and generation . |
FAIRGAMER: Evaluating Social Biases in LLM-Based Video Game NPCs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bingkang Shi, Jen-tse Huang, Luo Long, Tianyu Zong, Hongzhu Yi, Yuanxiang Wang, Songlin Hu, Xiaodan Zhang, Zhongjiang Yao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced or replaced traditional non-player characters in video games. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate social biases across three interaction patterns: transaction, cooperation, and competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses four bias types across transaction, cooperation, and competition using a novel metric, FairMCV. |
Dynamic Chunking and Selection for Reading Comprehension of Ultra-Long Context in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current methods for improving large language models rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks, compromising accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for dynamically separating and selecting chunks of long context, facilitating a more streamlined input for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods on single-hop and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks. |
CMIG: Conceptual Metaphor Theory-Inspired Framework for Metaphorical Image Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SafeConf: A Confidence-Calibrated Safety Self-Evaluation Method for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Zhang, Cong Gao, Linkang Yang, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Xiaoying Bai, Jun Zhang, Wen Yao, Zhong Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have many advantages but they also pose significant safety risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the safety self-evaluation capability of LLMs . they perform semantic mutations on the original safety evaluation questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety self-evaluation accuracy by 5.86% and 7.79% over baseline methods on Chinese and English datasets. |
SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoyang Wang, Yiming Liang, Xuchao Zhang, Qianhui Wu, Siwei Han, Anson Bastos, Rujia Wang, Chetan Bansal, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Saravan Rajmohan, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on synthetic supervision but have encountered data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully synthetic supervision framework that aims at improving data quality via dual refinement of both tasks and trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on standardized benchmarks and shows promising results on a standardized test. |
Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Short Product Title Generation in Mobile E-Commerce (N19-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for short product title generation only consider textual information from long titles . MM-GAN incorporates image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual info from original long titles. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal generative adversarial network for short product title generation in E-commerce . they incorporate image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual information from original long titles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale E-commerce dataset. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MarkerGen (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Chuyi Tan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Jiayi Shi, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to control text length are lacking in LCTG, posing a major limitation for practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play approach that decomposes LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and performs detailed error analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability. |
CodeRetriever: A Large Scale Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Code Search (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaonan Li, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Daxin Jiang, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing code pre-training approaches often adopt (masked) language modeling as the training objective which targets on learning to predict (macked) tokens in a given code context. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-text contrastive learning model which learns function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art with significant improvement over existing pre-trained models on eleven domain/language-specific code search tasks with six programming languages in different code granularity. |
ZigZagKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression for Long-context Modeling based on Layer Uncertainty (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference of Large Language models (LLMs) are limited in their ability to retain key tokens as input length increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages layer uncertainty to allocate budget size for each layer to reduce memory usage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage of the KV caches to only 20% when compared to full KV inference while achieving nearly lossless performance. |
Takin-VC: Expressive Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Adaptive Hybrid Content Encoding and Enhanced Timbre Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Yuguang, Yu Pan, Jixun Yao, Xiang Zhang, Jianhao Ye, Hongbin Zhou, Lei Xie, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao
| Challenge: | Expressive zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to modify source timbre to match unseen speaker . existing zero- shot VC systems struggle to reproduce paralinguistic information in highly expressive speech . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for expressive zero-shot voice conversion that uses hybrid content encoding and memory-augmented context-aware timbre modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art VC systems in speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and speaker similarness. |
SLIM: Subtrajectory-Level Elimination for More Effective Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Xifeng Yao, Chengyuan Ma, Dongyu Lang, Yinhao Ni, Zhiwei Xu, Huarui Xie, Zihao Chen, Guang Shen, Dandan Tu, Yi Bai, Changzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Notable examples include OpenAI’s o1/o3/o4 series and DeepSeek-R1 . |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to identify suboptimal subtrajectories based on human-established criteria . they also use a sampling algorithm to select data whose reasoning process is free from suboptimally subtravertories to the highest degree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of suboptimal subtrajectories by 25.9% during the inference process. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
Exploring Layer Activation Dynamic of CoT via Knowledge Probe (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought reasoning has emerged as a crucial paradigm for multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage probing framework that enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution. |
RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haonan Bian, Zhiyuan Yao, Sen Hu, Zishan Xu, Shaolei Zhang, Yifu Guo, Ziliang Yang, Xueran Han, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks simulate the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Li, Ji Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on self-consistency show that it improves reasoning abilities by aggregating diverse stochastic samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature to align with high probability modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-diversity baselines on reasoning tasks and improves both average and best-case performance. |
Sparse Growing Transformer: Training-Time Sparse Depth Allocation via Progressive Attention Looping (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yao Chen, Yilong Chen, Yinqi Yang, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zefeng Zhang, Shuaiyi Nie, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to increasing effective depth of LLMs rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time sparse depth allocation framework that progressively increases depth for a small subset of parameters as training evolves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of language models while reducing training FLOPs overhead from approximately 16–20% to only 1–3% relative to a standard Transformer backbone. |
Speaking in Wavelet Domain: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Speed up Speech Diffusion Model (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangyu Zhang, Daijiao Liu, Hexin Liu, Qiquan Zhang, Hanyu Meng, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, EngSiong Chng, Lina Yao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance inference speed and training require complex modifications to the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to double the training and inference speed of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models by simply redirecting the generative target to the wavelet domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method doubles the training and inference speed of Speech DDPMs by redirecting the generative target to the wavelet domain. |
RemoteRAG: A Privacy-Preserving LLM Cloud RAG Service (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to generate factually incorrect or purely fictional responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose to use remote RAG to protect user query from privacy leakage . they introduce (n,)-DistanceDP to characterize privacy leakages of user query . |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can resist embedding inversion attacks while achieving no loss in retrieval under various settings. |
ECOLA: Enhancing Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhen Han, Ruotong Liao, Jindong Gu, Yao Zhang, Zifeng Ding, Yujia Gu, Heinz Koeppl, Hinrich Schütze, Volker Tresp
| Challenge: | Existing enhancement approaches cannot be applied to temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs) existing enhancement approaches assume knowledge embedding is time-independent, whereas entity embedded in tKG models evolves . |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual data to enhance temporal knowledge embedding by Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (ECOLA) to evaluate ECOLA, they introduce three new datasets for training and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves Hits@1 on the link prediction task. |
Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GUI agents are susceptible to environmental distractions. |
| Approach: | They propose a scenario where both user and agent are benign and environment is not malicious . they implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves faithfulness of multimodal large language model agents in a graphical user interface environment. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Clear Up Confusion: Iterative Differential Generation for Fine-grained Intent Detection with Contrastive Feedback (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies on fine-grained intent detection have focused on collecting large-scale and high-quality samples via crowdsourcing resulting in data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative differential generation framework with contrastive feedback to generate high-quality pseudo samples and accurately capture the crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality pseudo samples and captures crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environments (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Changhao Jiang, Zhengyin Du, Yufei Xu, Xuesong Yao, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Currently, there are no efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated environment construction pipeline that incorporates scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment to enable high-quality training environments without external tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the models’ tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities. |
Efficient Hyper-parameter Search for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning knowledge graphs do not search hyper-parameters efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient two-stage search algorithm which explores HP configurations on small subgraph and transfers top-performed configurations for fine-tuning on large full graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method finds better HPs than baseline algorithms within the same time budget and achieves 9.1% relative improvement on large-scale knowledge graphs. |
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Weijie Shi, Hao Chen, Jiaming Li, Yao Zhao, Yazhong Zhang, Qijin Chen, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks. |
Breaking the Ceiling: Exploring the Potential of Jailbreak Attacks through Expanding Strategy Space (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to exploit black-box jailbreaks fail to capture key attack patterns . a novel framework decomposes jailbreak strategies into essential components . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes jailbreak strategies into essential components and develops genetic-based optimization with intention evaluation mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 90% success rate on Claude-3.5, where prior methods completely fail . it also surpasses specialized safeguard models in evaluation accuracy . |
xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jianguo Zhang, Tian Lan, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Thai Quoc Hoang, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Rithesh R N, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant research interest, but there are few standards for developing specialized models for agent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of large action models with dense and mixture-of-expert architectures that unifies, augments, and synthesizes diverse datasets to enhance agent generalizability and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GPT-4, Claude-3, and many other models in terms of tool use and outperformed GPT-based models on multiple agent ability benchmarks. |
Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Shumin Deng, Peng Wang, Xiang Chen, Jia-Chen Gu, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, we can understand knowledge mechanisms in LLMs for learning, storage, utilization, and evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) they examine utilization, evolution, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) they hope to help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to analyze the evolution of parametric knowledge in LLMs. |
LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior research on Twitter has provided positive evidence of its utility in developing supplementary health surveillance systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to surveil public health, focusing on mental health outcomes by using tweets from 765 neighborhoods in the USA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy over the previous framework, and extrapolates CDC’s estimates to proxy unreported neighborhoods. |
EasyEdit2: An Easy-to-use Steering Framework for Editing Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Shuxun Wang, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Mengru Wang, Xinle Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, however, they may still generate unreliable or unsafe outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The framework is designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qingjia Huang, Jingyu Zhang, Jianguo Wu, Yakai Li, Weijuan Zhang, Yankai Rong, Junyi Yao, Shengzhi Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia
| Challenge: | Currently, evaluation criteria and methods used for jailbreak effectiveness are inconsistent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure jailbreak effectiveness using a model that filters out jailbreak noise while preserving the original malicious question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods on a challenging benchmark containing 330 human-labeled, non-rejected jailbreak instances. |
Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model development, protecting the model’s parameters and training data has become an urgent and crucial concern. |
| Approach: | They define "reverse engineering" techniques as attacks on large language models and provide an in-depth analysis of them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks are described as “reverse engineering” techniques on LMs and provide an introduction to existing protective strategies. |
From Verbatim to Gist: Distilling Pyramidal Multimodal Memory via Semantic Information Bottleneck for Long-Horizon Video Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models struggle with long-horizon video understanding due to limited context windows and static memory mechanisms that fail to mirror human cognitive efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a pyramidal multimodal memory architecture grounded in Fuzzy-Trace Theory that structures memory hierarchically into a *Sensory Buffer*, *Episodic Stream*, and *Symbolic Schema*. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art on both offline and streaming tasks, demonstrating robust generalization and validating the effectiveness of cognition-inspired memory organization. |
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Zhengyin Du, Xuesong Yao, Weijian Lin, Yufei Xu, Zehui Chen, Zaiyuan Wang, Sining Zhu, Zhiheng Xi, Siyu Yuan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families. |
Chatbot To Help Patients Understand Their Health (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Won Seok Jang, Hieu Tran, Manav Shaileshkumar Mistry, Sai Kiran Gandluri, Yifan Zhang, Sharmin Sultana, Sunjae Kwon, Yuan Zhang, Zonghai Yao, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | NoteAid-Chatbot is a conversational AI designed to help patients better understand their health . |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning paradigm that leverages a multi-agent large language model and reinforcement learning framework without relying on costly human-generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses non-expert human training methods. |
CAIR: Causal Adaptive Information-based Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal emotion reasoning produce fluent but superficial explanations that lack authentic logical derivation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats rationales as causal mediators between raw perceptual signals and emotional semantics and an adaptive optimization mechanism to balance perception and reasoning across varying cognitive loads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms specialized SFT models by 14.4% while enhancing rationale faithfulness. |
GoT-R1: Internalizing Graph-of-Thought via Structural Reinforcement for High-Density Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning suffers from an inherent mechanism flaw: linearity induces overthinking . emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally redefined artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces verbose linear trajectories with high-density reasoning graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models with reduced token overhead. |
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Gao, Yuguang Yao, Qi Zhang, Kaiwen Dong, Avinash Baidya, Ruocheng Guo, Hilaf Hasson, Kamalika Das
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic approach to adapt large language models to task-specific tools . they propose reusable rules that are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning. |
Behavior Knowledge Merge in Reinforced Agentic Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are suboptimal to preserve task-specific capabilities on RL-trained agentic models. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-aware merging framework specifically designed for RL-trained agentic models that disentangles shared and task-specific unique parameter updates while selectively preserving and rescaling unique ones. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple agent domains and model architectures show that the proposed framework surpasses baselines and unlocks synergistic potential among agents. |
Disentangled Code Representation Learning for Multiple Programming Languages (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Developing effective distributed representations of source code is challenging . current code embedding approaches that represent the semantic and syntax of code are less interpretable . |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangled code representation learning approach to separate the semantic from the syntax of source code under a multi-programming-language setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better interpretability and generalizability over existing methods. |
Verifiable Format Control for Large Language Model Generations (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on benchmarking general instruction following while overlooking how to improve specific format following ability for small LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize massive datasets to improve LLMs' format following abilities by using a verifiable format following feature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the format following ability of small LLMs with about 7B parameters. |
DAPE-BR: Distance-Aware Positional Encoding for Mitigating Object Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Vision–Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from object hallucination, generating descriptions for objects that are absent from the image, which undermines reliability and hinders real-world deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a positional-alignment scheme that preserves pretrained weight order while globally—- visual–text distances, embeds an isotropic fused patch-distance metric, and applies a patch-delay causal mask to enforce spatial causality. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on POPE, MMStar and SQA show that DAPE-BR reduces hallucinations and boosts performance. |
nvAgent: Automated Data Visualization from Natural Language via Collaborative Agent Workflow (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | *Natural Language to Visualization (NL2Vis) seeks to transform natural-language descriptions into visual representations of given tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative agent workflow for NL2Vis that incorporates three agents . the model is called **nvAgent** and comprises a processor agent for database processing and context filtering, a composer agent for planning visualization generation and a validator agent for code translation and output verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow surpasses state-of-the-art models on the VisEval benchmark. |
SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chuhan Wang, Xintong Li, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based approaches fail to address this challenge by exploiting language priors to bypass visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages scene graphs as structured visual information to perform controllable structural interventions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness across seven visual reasoning benchmarks. |
Towards User-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a good translation should implicitly mirror user traits rather than translate the original content semantically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures user traits from historical inputs . they propose 'user-driven' NMT to model user behavior under a zero-shot learning fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can capture user traits from historical inputs under zero-shot learning fashion. |
KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect contaminated texts focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework which incorporates an LLM-powered “interactor” role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a question in a standard LLM benchmark and can be used to evaluate models in real-world conversations. |
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Wang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao, Xin He, Qu Yang, Qingxuan Jiang, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |
Improving Reasoning Capabilities in Small Models through Mixture-of-layers Distillation with Stepwise Attention on Key Information (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on transferring teacher-generated rationales to student models, but do not explore teachers’ dynamic attention towards critical information during reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers the teacher’s stepwise attention on key information to the student model and a Mixture of Layers module that allows dynamic alignment between the teacher and student. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves consistent performance improvements across multiple mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
SlackAgents: Scalable Collaboration of AI Agents in Workspaces (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiwei Liu, Weiran Yao, Zuxin Liu, Juntao Tan, Jianguo Zhang, Frank Wang, Sukhandeep Nahal, Huan Wang, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing open-source frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex fail to integrate into daily workflows, resulting in limited daily usage for work. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent library for scalable management and collaboration of AI agents on Slack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers instant AI integration into organizational workflows and facilitates scalable collaboration, allowing for effective communication and task orchestration. |
FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Zhengran Zeng, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive performance across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated evaluations of large language models . they open-source their code at https://github.com/WisdomShell/FreeEval . |
| Outcome: | The framework is open-source and can be used to develop and validate new evaluation methods. |
Can We Learn Question, Answer, and Distractors All from an Image? A New Task for Multiple-choice Visual Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on generating QADs from image and question, but a novel task is needed to generate meaningful questions, correct answers, and challenging distractors. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate QADs from images and encode images together . they use contrastive learning to ensure consistency of QAD generated and tested . |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on the benchmark dataset validate the performance of the proposed task. |
Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing self-reflection mechanisms are reactive and inefficient for large language models . a fundamental tension persists between the ability to execute complex multi-step reasoning and the ability of the model to generate coherent traces. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time framework that reflects before generating at uncertain points . SRGen utilizes dynamic entropy thresholding to identify high-uncertainty tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can significantly strengthen large language models' reasoning process. |
Synergistic Weak-Strong Collaboration by Aligning Preferences (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yizhu Jiao, Xuchao Zhang, Zhaoyang Wang, Yubo Ma, Zhun Deng, Rujia Wang, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Jiawei Han, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models excel in general reasoning yet struggle with specialized tasks requiring proprietary or domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that pairs a specialized weak model with a general strong model to optimize collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms each model alone by leveraging complementary strengths. |
Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhao Li, Haifeng Sun, Xuesong Zhang, Shu Yao, Haoyu Zheng, Yvchuan Wang, Huazheng Wang, Zirui Zhuang, Qi Qi, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to code generation fail to consider the quality of retrieved examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that combines existing API examples to improve complexity and readability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline methods. |
ACE-Router: Generalizing History-Aware Routing from MCP Tools to the Agent Web (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyuan Yao, Zishan Xu, Yifu Guo, Zhiguang Han, Cheng Yang, Shuo Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing routers that use hardcoded tools are limited by scalability and generality bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for training history-aware routers to empower precise navigation in large-scale ecosystems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can train routers with dynamic context understanding to create the plug-and-play Light Routing Agent. |
A Cause-Effect Look at Alleviating Hallucination of Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems have demonstrated impressive performance conducting fluent and natural-sounding conversations, but they are plagued by the Knowledge Hallucination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exploits the dialogue-knowledge interaction to reduce hallucination by using external knowledge resources to generate more informative responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination without disrupting other dialogue performance while keeping adaptive to different generation models. |
Learning Structural Information for Syntax-Controlled Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Syntax-controlled paraphrase generation aims to produce paraphrase conform to given syntactic patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that captures parent-child and sibling relations and a syntax encoder to capture alignment relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in terms of semantic and syntactic quality on two popular benchmark datasets. |
Locate-and-Focus: Enhancing Terminology Translation in Speech Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Suhang Wu, Jialong Tang, Chengyi Yang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Junhui Li, Junfeng Yao, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods for terminology translation struggle with interference from irrelevant noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Locate-and-Focus method that locates terminologies within utterances to construct translation knowledge by minimizing irrelevant information for ST models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method locates terminologies within utterances and enhances the success rate of terminology translation while maintaining robust general translation performance. |
Invisible Prompts, Visible Threats: Malicious Font Injection in External Resources for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly equipped with capabilities of real-time web search and integrated with protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). |
| Approach: | They investigate the vulnerability of Large Language Models to hidden adversarial prompts . they evaluate two critical attack scenarios: malicious content relay and sensitive data leakage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension could introduce new security vulnerabilities. |
NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Wei Zhao, Zhitao Hou, Siyuan Wu, Yan Gao, Haoyu Dong, Yao Wan, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Haidong Zhang
| Challenge: | Creating spreadsheet formulas remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users . a novel task is proposed to generate spreadsheet formulae from a user's NL query . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table given a Natural Language query as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a natural language query as input. |
LightMoE: Task-Aware Expert Availability Management for Memory-Efficient MoE-LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for balancing model accuracy with inference latency are limited due to memory constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for memory-efficient MoE inference that exploits the functional redundancy and temporal locality of expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy-efficiency trade-off by 4.3% over pruned models and 2.4% over dynamic swapping methods while maintaining inference latency comparable to pruned model. |
PAR: Training-Free Positional Perturbation and Attention Recycling for Faithful OCR (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In high-precision tasks, vision language models suffer from Linguistic Priors Hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, inference-time intervention framework to mitigate this by integrating visual encoders with Large Language Model decoders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucination rates by 12% in long-context scenarios while maintaining robust generalization on standard benchmarks. |
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SpikeVoice performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN . major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN and explores the potential of SNN to "speak". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. |