Papers by Yifan Li

121 papers
GLGR: Question-aware Global-to-Local Graph Reasoning for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches for multi-hop reasoning are lacking for local graph reasoning . existing approaches neglect local semantic structures in utterances .
Approach: They propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach that expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a query node.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on Molweni and FriendsQA.
Graph Reasoning for Question Answering with Triplet Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to answer complex questions require reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) state-of-the-art methods constrain retrieved knowledge in local subgraphs and discard more diverse triplets that are disconnected but useful for question answering.
Approach: They propose a method to retrieve the most relevant triplets from KGs and then rerank them, which are then concatenated with questions to be fed into language models.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on commonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets with 4.6% absolute accuracy.
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense.
Approach: They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation.
Outcome: The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture.
HiCoLoRA: Addressing Context-Prompt Misalignment via Hierarchical Collaborative LoRA for Zero-Shot DST (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to zero-shot Dialog State Tracking (zs-DST) are inadequate to generalize to new domains without extensive training.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances zero-shot slot inference through robust prompt alignment.
Outcome: Experiments on multi-domain datasets show that HiCoLoRA outperforms baselines, achieving SOTA in zs-DST.
Hierarchical Memory Organization for Wikipedia Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for generating Wikipedia articles do not utilize memory directly for outline generation.
Approach: They propose a method to generate Wikipedia articles autonomously by leveraging a hierarchical memory architecture.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in producing informative and reliable articles.
CoCA: Fusing Position Embedding with Collinear Constrained Attention in Transformers for Long Context Window Extending (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models that use self-attention and position embedding have anomalous behavior that hinder long context window extrapolation.
Approach: They propose a collinear constraint between Q and K to integrate RoPE and self-attention.
Outcome: The proposed model integrates self-attention and position embedding into LLMs without fine-tuning.
CodeRAG: Finding Relevant and Necessary Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Repository-Level Code Completion (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in code large language models have produced repository-level code completion methods that automatically predict the unfinished code based on the broader information from the repository.
Approach: They propose a framework to identify relevant knowledge for retrieval-augmented repository-level code completion.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ReccEval and CCEval.
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples.
Reflection on Knowledge Graph for Large Language Models Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for supplementing Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs often introduce noise in the retrieval and reasoning pipeline, hindering their ability to integrate external knowledge for complex multi-hop question answering.
Approach: They propose a framework to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities through reflective engagement with knowledge graphs by Query Decoupling, LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Exploration, and Inference with Knowledge Reconstruction.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates external knowledge into LLMs and trains them to leverage this knowledge for answering questions.
AgentBank: Towards Generalized LLM Agents via Fine-Tuning on 50000+ Interaction Trajectories (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies focus on specialized agents designed for particular tasks.
Approach: They propose to scale annotated interaction trajectories and fine-tune LLMs on AgentBank to get a series of agent models, Samoyed.
Outcome: The proposed model can scale to get generalized agent capabilities.
Unraveling and Mitigating Retriever Inconsistencies in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) do not consistently outperform the original retrieval-free Language Model (LM).
Approach: They propose a trainable framework that can adaptively retrieve from different knowledge sources and effectively decrease unpredictable reader errors.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves performance over the RALM with a single retriever by significantly reducing inconsistent behaviors.
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data.
Outcome: The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model.
Diffusion-NAT: Self-Prompting Discrete Diffusion for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation (2024.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-text generation methods are unable to generate coherent and fluent texts due to discrete nature of text.
Approach: They propose to integrate discrete diffusion models (DDM) into NAR text-to-text generation and integrate BART to improve the performance.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms competing methods and surpasses autoregressive methods on 7 datasets.
Ask-and-Verify: Span Candidate Generation and Verification for Attribute Value Extraction (2022.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing reading comprehension models can over-generate attribute values which hinders precision.
Approach: They propose a product attribute value extraction task that captures key factual information from product descriptions and a new end-to-end pipeline framework called Ask-and-Verify.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models by up to 3.1% F1 absolute improvement points while scaling to thousands of attributes.
ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for recommendation explanation evaluation lack item diversity and user preferences data.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark based on Amazon e-commerce categories with implicit preferences . they propose two novel automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations .
Outcome: The proposed model-agnostic evaluation benchmark outperforms existing methods in a variety of domains.
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability.
Approach: They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs .
Outcome: The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks.
Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from object hallucinations, i.e., they tend to generate objects inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions.
Approach: They propose to integrate powerful large vision-language models (LVLMs) they propose a polling-based query method to evaluate object hallucination .
Outcome: The proposed model can evaluate object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way.
LLM Jailbreak Detection for (Almost) Free! (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for detecting jailbreak prompts entail significant computational costs .
Approach: They propose a free jailbreak detection method which scales logits by temperature to detect jailbreak prompts .
Outcome: The proposed method detects jailbreak prompts with no additional computational costs.
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are constrained by static representations, inadequately evaluating their ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge.
Approach: They propose a benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types to evaluate temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 tasks, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability.
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability.
Approach: They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources.
An Empirical Comparison of Unsupervised Constituency Parsing Methods (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for unsupervised constituency parsing are inconsistent due to data preprocessing, lexicalization, and evaluation metrics.
Approach: They propose to standardize experimental settings for better comparability between methods . they compare existing methods with those proposed by decade-old models .
Outcome: The proposed methods perform better than decade-old models on English and Japanese, respectively, compared with decade- old models.
Integrating Data Validation with Large Language Models for Regulation-Guided Tabular Anomaly Detection (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing tabular anomaly detection methods focus on detecting anomalies based on data distribution without considering regulatory compliance.
Approach: They propose a task that leverages regulations to detect anomalies in tabular data . they also develop three new datasets to address this task .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on three new datasets.
DeepGuard: Secure Code Generation via Multi-Layer Semantic Aggregation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can replicate insecure patterns from training data.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages distributed security-relevant cues by aggregating representations from multiple upper layers via an attention-based module.
Outcome: Experiments show that the framework improves the secure-and-correct generation rate by 11.9% over baselines.
Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: In the era of evaluating large language models, data contamination is an increasingly prominent concern . static benchmarking has been used for evaluation, but there are limitations of *dynamic* benchmarks .
Approach: They propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *static* benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks highlight a critical gap in the evaluation of LLMs.
IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Instruction-tuned language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive services across various applications.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy by comparing their models to a set of benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers 3,538 examples across nine tasks covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict.
Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies attribute catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come . Continual relation extraction models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new relations .
Approach: They propose to use adversarial class augmentation mechanism to learn more precise representations . they propose to train the model on a sequence of tasks where two new relations are discovered .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two popular benchmarks.
TNT: Text Normalization based Pre-training of Transformers for Content Moderation (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Language model pre-training (self-supervised or unsupervised learning) has been widely used in a multitude of language processing tasks such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering and content moderation.
Approach: They propose a new language pre-training model TNT for content moderation that uses a combination of masking strategy and text normalization to learn from text.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on hate speech classification task and is a potential approach to misspelling correction.
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses.
Approach: They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy.
Outcome: The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy.
MemeReaCon: Probing Contextual Meme Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current approaches focus on isolated meme analysis, either for harmful content detection or standalone interpretation, overlooking a fundamental challenge: the same meme can express different intents depending on its conversational context.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large vision language models understand memes in their original context.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates how large vision language models understand meme intent in their original context.
FLAT-LLM: Fine-grained Low-rank Activation Space Transformation for Large Language Model Compression (2026.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Low-rank decomposition methods suffer from accuracy degradation and expensive calibration procedures.
Approach: They propose a fast and accurate, training-free structural compression method based on fine-grained low-rank transformations in the activation space.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms pruning baselines in generalization and downstream performance while delivering inference speedups.
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities.
Approach: They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB.
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip? (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language benchmarks, yet current evaluations focus on single-image reasoning.
Approach: STRIPCIPHER is a benchmark designed to evaluate model ability on understanding implicit narratives in silent comics.
Outcome: STRIPCIPHER is a high-quality, human-annotated dataset featuring fine-grained annotations and comprehensive coverage of varying difficulty levels.
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness.
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge.
Approach: They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict.
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking.
Approach: They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking.
More Tokens, Lower Precision: Towards the Optimal Token-Precision Trade-off in KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: storing more tokens in the KV cache at lower precision can enhance the long-context performance of large language models.
Approach: They propose a token-precision trade-off strategy to optimize KV cache compression . they also propose storing more tokens in the KV at lower precision .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an optimal point within the Information Bottleneck compared to standalone KV pruning or KV quantization.
TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing post-SFT methods for embodied AI are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation.
Approach: They propose to integrate Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) into embodied decision-making by transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves an average success rate of 26.67% in the ALFWorld environment, and a 6% improvement over RL4VLM.
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios.
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens .
Approach: They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data.
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to reason about related conceptual knowledge effectively, despite a lack of model-level relational reasoning.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess concept-level and instance-level relational reasoning abilities of edited models.
Outcome: The proposed model obtains the best scores on the memory-based in-context editing baseline, MICE, suggesting a promising direction for model editing.
Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: E-commerce pre-sales dialogues elicit user needs and preferences for items . large language models lack domain-specific knowledge for accurate recommendations .
Approach: They propose two collaboration strategies to integrate CRS and large language models in pre-sales dialogues.
Outcome: The proposed methods can be very effective in some cases, the authors say .
ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to adapt image-focused models for video understanding have not been successful in analyzing long video sequences.
Approach: They propose a video instruction dataset that outperforms existing video instruction data for fine-tuning MLLMs by incrementally increasing input context length.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on video benchmarks and outperformed proprietary models on VideoMME even with a compact 7B model.
SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLM (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Vision-extended LLMs have made significant strides in VQA, but they still encounter significant difficulties in handling queries involving long-tail entities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to test models' ability to identify entities and provide detailed, entity-specific knowledge by combining 10 images and 10 knowledge-intensive QA pairs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the SnapNTell dataset, achieving a 66.5% improvement in the BELURT score.
InfoCL: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Text Classification from An Information Theoretic Perspective (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have identified the severe performance decrease on analogous classes as a key factor for catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a replay-based continual text classification method that uses fast-slow and current-past contrastive learning to perform mutual information maximization and better recover previously learned representations.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three text classification tasks.
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property.
Approach: They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness.
Dialogue Generation on Infrequent Sentence Functions via Structured Meta-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose of a sentence in a conversation.
Approach: They propose a structured meta-learning approach for dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves informativeness and relevance of dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions while preserving knowledge generalization for similar sentence functions.
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning.
Approach: They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics.
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints.
Approach: They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives.
MultiSQL: A Schema-Integrated Context-Dependent Text2SQL Dataset with Diverse SQL Operations (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Text2SQL is a task that translates natural language into SQL statements.
Approach: They propose a task that translates natural language into SQL statements.
Outcome: The proposed task enables users to convert natural language into SQL statements.
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Self-Injecting Hallucinations (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection.
Approach: a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies.
Outcome: a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation.
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current abstractive summarization models generate inconsistent content due to the inherently noisy dataset and the discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation based training objectives and consistency measurements.
Approach: They propose a new consistency taxonomy that categorizes inconsistent content into faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness.
Outcome: Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency.
Tree-of-Code: A Self-Growing Tree Framework for End-to-End Code Generation and Execution in Complex Tasks (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Effectively and efficiently handling complex realworld problems has become a key focus across industry and academia.
Approach: They propose a tree-of-code framework that generates nodes through self-supervision and combines prompt and model exploration in a GT-free setting.
Outcome: Experiments on two datasets with ten popular zero-shot LLMs show that Tree-of-Code boosts accuracy by nearly 20% over CodeAct with fewer than 1/4 turns.
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving.
Approach: They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger.
Adaptive Detoxification: Safeguarding General Capabilities of LLMs through Toxicity-Aware Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing knowledge editing methods for large language models (LLMs) suffer from over-editing, where detoxified models reject legitimate queries, compromising overall performance.
Approach: They propose a toxicity-aware knowledge editing approach that dynamically detects toxic activation patterns during forward propagation and then routes computations through adaptive inter-layer pathways to mitigate toxicity effectively.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on large language models and enhances the SafeEdit benchmark.
Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work focuses on extracting aspect terms and opinion terms without considering the relations between aspect terms .
Approach: They propose a task to extract aspect terms, opinion terms, and expressed sentiments from a two-dimensional (2D) table.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks and is well-suited to the ASTE task.
Task-Aware Resolution Optimization for Visual Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing visual large language models pre-assume a fixed resolution for downstream tasks, leading to sub-optimal performance.
Approach: They propose a formula to determine the optimal resolution for a given vision-language task . they then propose 'parameter-efficient' fine-tuning technique to extend the visual input resolution .
Outcome: The proposed method is based on rigorous experiments on vision-language tasks.
Reimagining Safety Alignment with An Image (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to large language models face inefficiency, fragility, or architectural constraints, resulting in inefficient performance and heightened over-refusal in cross-modal tasks.
Approach: They propose an optimization-driven visual prompt framework that enhances security and reduces over-refusal at the same time.
Outcome: The proposed framework enhances security and reduces over-refusal while maintaining robust safety while reducing unnecessary denials.
Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from statistical sequence predictors to sophisticated autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and sustaining multi-turn conversa-tions.
Approach: They propose a system that instantiates a "Sentient Agent" that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the model in multi-turn conversations.
Outcome: The proposed framework measures the agent's higher-order social cognition in multi-turn conversations.
SynthFix: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Code Vulnerability Repair (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex semantic and structural correctness required for automated code repair.
Approach: They propose a hybrid neural-symbolic framework that unifies code synthesis with compiler-informed symbolic feedback to improve LLM-based vulnerability repair.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves code repair accuracy and efficiency over strong SFT and RFT training strategies on the FixJS and CodeFlaws benchmarks.
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement.
Outcome: The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3.
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across modules and layers.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows for faster convergence of low-rank adaptive models . they use a hypernetwork to prune the outputs of the hypernetworks to generate parameters .
Outcome: The proposed framework accelerates convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork.
Interview Evaluation: A Novel Approach for Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Question Answering Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation methods for CQA use pre-collected human-human conversations . previous methods use model-predicted dialogue history instead of ground truth .
Approach: They propose an automatic evaluation approach that uses the model's dialogue history to evaluate models.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on existing models and their evaluations on QuAC and CoQA.
The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others.
Approach: They propose a CharToM-QA benchmark to assess the importance of comprehensive contextual understanding about personal backgrounds in ToM.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on 1,035 ToM questions based on classic novels and shows that educated participants perform better when they have read the novels than non-educated participants.
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading.
Approach: They propose a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding of document and dialog.
Outcome: The proposed model improves document interpretation and dialog understanding on the ShARC benchmark.
Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge-based visual question answering are based on pre-trained language models.
Approach: They propose a language model guided captioning approach that leverages a pre-trained language model to generate captions for an image to help answer a visual question.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms several competing methods on the knowledge-based VQA task and achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model.
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents .
Approach: They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions .
Outcome: The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions .
Interconnected Question Generation with Coreference Alignment and Conversation Flow Modeling (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Extensive experiments show that our system outperforms several baselines and can generate highly conversational questions.
Approach: They propose a neural model that generates interconnected questions in question-answering style conversations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and can generate highly conversational questions.
Ambiguity-aware Multi-level Incongruity Fusion Network for Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for sarcasm detection focus on fusing text and image information to establish cross-modal correlations, overlooking the significance of original unimodal incongruity information.
Approach: They propose a multi-modal incongruity learning module to capture inconcluity information simultaneously at the text-level, image-level and cross-modal-level.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset.
D2R: Dual-Branch Dynamic Routing Network for Multimodal Sentiment Detection (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for multimodal sentiment detection use the same fixed framework to classify the sentiment polarity of image-text pairs.
Approach: They propose a multimodal dynamic interaction model that uses a fixed framework to classify the sentiment polarity of a given imagetext pair.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three publicly available datasets.
Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions.
Approach: They propose a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns and provides tailored rewards towards evolving user goals.
Outcome: The proposed agent interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals.
ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Figures of speech often deviate from their literal meanings to express deeper semantic implications.
Approach: They propose a concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese . it shows that the proposed tasks are challenging for existing models .
Glue pizza and eat rocks - Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Retrieval-Augmented Generative Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases.
Approach: They propose to exploit openness of RAG models by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior.
Outcome: The proposed model can be exploited through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever.
Watch Every Step! LLM Agent Learning via Iterative Step-level Process Refinement (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent approaches to enhance agent performance focus on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals.
Approach: They propose a step-level framework that provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training by using Monte Carlo methods.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on three tasks and shows that it is effective in augmenting efficiency and its applicability to diverse models.
Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies show that Pretrained Language Models can store factual knowledge, but facts stored in PLMs are not always correct.
Approach: They propose a lightweight method to calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used to calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch.
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options.
Approach: They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks.
ReCUT: Balancing Reasoning Length and Accuracy in LLMs via Stepwise Trails and Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to train LLMs suffer from overthinking, leading to lengthy reasoning traces . Existing approaches to train large language models suffer from this problem .
Approach: They propose a method to combine multiple reasoning chains for training LLMs . they use stepwise exploration and long-short switched sampling to evaluate reasoning paths .
Outcome: The proposed method reduces reasoning lengths by approximately 30-50% . it also maintains or improves reasoning accuracy compared to baselines .
Chain-Talker: Chain Understanding and Rendering for Empathetic Conversational Speech Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current generative CSS models face interpretability limitations due to insufficient emotional perception and redundant discrete speech coding.
Approach: They propose a framework that aligns synthesized speech with the emotional context of user-agent interactions to achieve empathy.
Outcome: The proposed framework produces more expressive speech than existing methods on three datasets.
DyBBT: Dynamic Balance via Bandit-inspired Targeting for Dialog Policy with Cognitive Dual Systems (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts.
Approach: They propose a dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space C.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization.
LLM Inductive Reasoning Through Multi-Agent Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing inductive reasoning of large language models often lack explicit optimization guidance and effective error correction.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play test-time framework that integrates multi-agent coordination with Monte Carlo Tree Search to improve inductive reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks and shows consistent improvements on QWQ-32B and Deepseek-V3 .
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding.
Approach: They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information.
Outcome: The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information.
Can We Steer Reasoning Direction by Thinking Intervention? (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Reason Models suffer from overthinking and erroneous reasoning problems due to the lack of fine-grained control over their reasoning behaviors.
Approach: They propose a paradigm to enable fine-grained control over LRMs’ reasoning behaviors by aligning reasoning trajectories with specific cognitive patterns.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm achieves integration intervention throughout model reasoning processes.
Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: XEUS is a cross-lingual encoder for universal speech that can be trained on 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages.
Approach: They propose a Cross-lingual Encoder for Universal Speech that can be trained on 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages and a newly created corpus of 7400+ hours from 4057 .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several benchmarks and outperfies MMS 1B and w2v-BERT 2.0 v2 by 0.8% and 4.4% respectively.
MPO: Boosting LLM Agents with Meta Plan Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for interactive planning tasks suffer from planning hallucinations and require retraining for each new agent.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages explicit guidance through meta plans to assist agent planning and enables continuous optimization based on feedback from the agent’s task execution.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines on two representative tasks and significantly improves task completion efficiency and generalization capabilities.
EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Code Language Models learn attention based on statistical input-output token correlations.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in three languages, with gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization.
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies explore approaches to synthesize instruction data with open-sourced LLMs but require high-quality human-crafted seed data.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end framework to synthesize high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data.
LoRaDA: Low-Rank Direct Attention Adaptation for Efficient LLM Fine-tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of language models.
Approach: They propose a low-rank direct attention adapted method for efficient LLM fine-tuning . they propose LMAM, which can bring negative attention to self-attention modules .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the full fine-tuning method by 2.1% on GLUE benchmark.
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges .
Approach: They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions.
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset .
Rationale-Enhanced Language Models are Better Continual Relation Learners (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have found that catastrophic forgetting arises from the model’s lack of robustness against future analogous relations.
Approach: They propose a multi-task rationale tuning strategy to help the model learn current relations robustly and conduct contrastive rationale replay to further distinguish analogous relations.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two benchmarks.
The Good, The Bad, and The Greedy: Evaluation of LLMs Should Not Ignore Non-Determinism (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) focus on a single output per example, which limits our understanding of LLM performance variability in real-world applications.
Approach: They explore the performance differences between greedy decoding and sampling and identify benchmarks’ consistency regarding non-determinism and examine unique model behaviors.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms sampling methods and greedy decoding outperformed other models.
Exploring Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing video captioning models fail to capture nuanced semantics of videos . existing models generate coarse descriptions of human motions, resulting in poor quality .
Approach: They construct a fine-grained human motion video captioning dataset named BoFiT and a model that generates fine-grain descriptions of human motions via prompting.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on comprehensive metrics.
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences.
Approach: They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications.
S3HQA: A Three-Stage Approach for Multi-hop Text-Table Hybrid Question Answering (2023.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing question answering systems use a retriever-reader framework to answer multi-hop questions . existing models lack retrieval, selector, and reasoner capabilities .
Approach: They propose a three-stage text tableQA framework which comprises of retriever, selector, and reasoner.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in the few-shot setting and ranks first on the HybridQA leaderboard.
CFlowPsyD: An Analysis-Enhanced Dataset for Asynchronous Psychological Counseling through Self-Optimizing Multi-Agent Framework (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Asynchronous psychological counseling (APC) is a crucial mental health service modality that transcends temporal and spatial constraints.
Approach: They propose a self-optimizing multi-agent framework for counseling dialogue generation, CFlowPsy, which utilizes real anonymized counseling cases as seed data to synthesize diverse problem-solving-oriented APC conversations through large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes diverse problem-solving-oriented APC conversations through large language models.
Render-of-Thought: Rendering Textual Chain-of-Thought as Images for Visual Latent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work on Chain-of-Thought prompting imposes substantial computational overhead . lack of supervision obscures the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain.
Approach: They propose a framework to render latent reasoning chain into images, making latent rationale explicit and traceable.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 3-4 token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT prompting.
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level.
Approach: They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set.
InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: In order to perform downstream tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) need continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm that allows for continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting . they propose to replay previous data based on task similarity with instructions .
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance over 16 tasks with different training orders.
Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations.
Approach: They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation .
LoRASC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing low-rank adaptations have limited expressiveness, a tendency to overfit, and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings.
Approach: They propose a technique to enhance LoRA’s expressiveness and generalization capabilities while preserving its training efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines, mitigates overfitting, enhances model stability, and improves OOD robustness.
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis. (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pre-trained large language models have exhibited an impressive ability to learn in context across various domains, e.g., code generation, education, medicine and even medicine.
Approach: They taxonomize existing candidate theories into three competing hypotheses that explain LLMs’ ability to learn in context.
Outcome: The proposed model can learn a task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration and generalize it to the prompt.
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications.
Approach: They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead.
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation.
Approach: They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations .
Outcome: The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states .
SCOTT: Self-Consistent Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LMs) generate free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought prompting, but there is little guarantee that the generated rationale is consistent with LM’s predictions or faithfully justify the decisions.
Approach: They propose a faithful knowledge distillation method to learn a small, self-consistent CoT model from a larger teacher model by contrastive decoding.
Outcome: The proposed method yields comparable performance but is less faithful than baselines.
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing embedding models support only 512 input tokens, hindering their application in scenarios requiring long inputs.
Approach: They evaluate the performance of existing embedding models by using a new benchmark and a training-free context window extension strategy.
Outcome: The proposed model extends the input window of existing models by several folds.
BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use.
Approach: They propose a modular framework that provides a unified view of backdoor threats in LLM agents.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a unified, agent-centric view of backdoor threats in LLM agents.
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations .
Approach: They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts .
Outcome: a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks .
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: elucidating scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training remains unexplored.
Approach: They characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact during pre-training . they find that large models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency .
Outcome: The proposed scaling laws offer practical guidance for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training.
Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step math reasoning problems, but their internal implementation is limited.
Approach: They propose to use a "C**ausal **E**ffect **D**riven **F**ine-tuning method" to improve LLMs' reasoning ability.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the model's reasoning ability by enhancing key components that are used to execute mixed arithmetic calculations.
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing data augmentations for coherence evaluation rely on heuristic rules and lack designing criteria.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation framework that breaks down coherence into global and local aspects and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses recent models in scoring and ranking tasks with 233M parameters.
ISR: Self-Refining Referring Expressions for Entity Grounding (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Entity grounding is a crucial task in the construction of multimodal knowledge graphs.
Approach: They propose a novel scheme to enhance the multimodal large language model's capability to generate high quality REs for the given entities as explicit contextual clues.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses other methods in entity grounding, highlighting its effectiveness, robustness and potential for broader applications.
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used.
Approach: They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark.
Outcome: The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history.
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph.
Outcome: The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.
Supporting Medical Relation Extraction via Causality-Pruned Semantic Dependency Forest (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Medical relation extraction (MRE) tasks aims to extract relations between entities in medical literature.
Approach: They propose to combine semantic and syntactic information from medical texts by using causal explanation theory.
Outcome: Empirically, the proposed model outperforms existing methods on benchmark medical datasets.
Target-to-Source Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is an important task in sentiment analysis, but data scarcity limits performance of existing methods.
Approach: They propose a target-to-source augmentation approach to alleviate the issue of data scarcity in Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) they use fluency and alignment discriminators to provide feedback and use this feedback to optimize the generator.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly improves the performance of existing methods.
Retrieval-Augmented Multilingual Keyphrase Generation with Retriever-Generator Iterative Training (2022.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on keyphrase generation on non-English languages haven’t been vastly investigated.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented method for multilingual keyphrase generation that leverages keyphrase annotations in English datasets to facilitate generating keyphrases in low-resource languages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on non-English keyphrase generation datasets and the proposed model is scalable.
From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Generative engines (GEs) are replacing ranked links with citation-grounded answers . current methods are unable to accumulate or transfer effective strategies across tasks and engines .
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework where planning, editing, and fidelity-aware evaluation serve as the execution layer.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms heuristic baselines in visibility and citation fidelity on three mainstream engines.
Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities.
Approach: They propose a mechanistic interpretation of language models for multi-step reasoning tasks by introducing a new probing approach that recovers the reasoning tree from the model’s attention patterns.
Outcome: The proposed model implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it, and detects the information from the model’s attention patterns for most examples.
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.
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages.
Trial and Error: Exploration-Based Trajectory Optimization of LLM Agents (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems.
Approach: They propose an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach that allows agents to learn from their exploration failures.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three complex tasks by a large margin.
Improving Question Generation With to the Point Context (D19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing sequence-to-sequence neural models may not be able to identify answer-relevant context words for question generation.
Approach: They propose to model the unstructured sentence and the structured answer-relevant relation for question generation by combining to the point context and unstructure.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed model improves on the unstructured sentence and the structured answer-relevant relation.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations