Papers by Yifan Yang
TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiahao Qiu, Yifu Lu, Yifan Zeng, Jiacheng Guo, Jiayi Geng, Chenhao Zhu, Xinzhe Juan, Ling Yang, Huazheng Wang, Kaixuan Huang, Yue Wu, Mengdi Wang
| Challenge: | Best-of-N (BoN) sampling generates multiple responses and selects the best one, achieving improved performance but with a high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a speculative tree-search strategy into Best-of-N (BoN) Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Best-of-N (BoN) sampling but has high computational cost . tree-search strategy reduces computational overhead while maintaining high output quality . |
WhitenedCSE: Whitening-based Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on seven semantic textual similarity tasks show our method achieves consistent improvement over the contrastive learning baseline and sets new states of the art. |
| Approach: | They propose a whitening-based contrastive learning method for sentence embedding learning which combines contrastive and shuffled group whitening. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better alignment and uniformity on seven semantic textual similarity tasks. |
TellWhisper: Tell Whisper Who Speaks When (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing 'when' and 'who' . a new framework that couples temporal structure with speaker dynamics is proposed to address these limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples temporal and speaker identity within the speech encoder . they propose TS-RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding that partitions Query/Key channels into temporal, speaker subspaces and applies region-specific rotations to align "when" and "who" cues in selfattention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework couples temporal structure with speaker dynamics in speech encoder . it uses frame-level speaker activity to estimate speaker-activity estimates . |
AdaZeta: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Tensor-Train Adaption for Memory-Efficient Large Language Models Fine-Tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in memory-efficient zeroth-order methods have limited their widespread adoption due to performance drops and a high risk of divergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient zeroth-order framework to improve performance and convergence of the MeZO methods by using only forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and convergence of the proposed methods on Roberta-Large and Llama-2-7B models. |
Wanda++: Pruning Large Language Models via Regional Gradients (2025.findings-acl)
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Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Bhavana Ganesh, Aram Galstyan, Goeric Huybrechts, Markus Müller, Jonas M. Kübler, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Sravan Babu Bodapati, Nathan Susanj, Zheng Zhang, Jack FitzGerald, Abhishek Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods suffer from accuracy degradation without full-model sparsity-aware fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning framework that uses decoder-block-level regional gradients to improve pruning accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms the state-of-the-art pruning frameworks by utilizing decoder-block-level regional gradients. |
A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Decoding methods are essential for converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate decoding methods in general-purpose large language models . they find that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform task-dependently and are influenced by alignment, model size, and quantization. |
An Empirical Study of Sentiment-Enhanced Pre-Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) are lacking in a comprehensive evaluation and fair comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a knowledge-mining method to build a large-scale knowledge-annotated SPT corpus and integrate sentiment knowledge into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to build a large-scale knowledge-annotated SPT corpus and compares with other methods. |
Retrieval Augmented Fact Verification by Synthesizing Contrastive Arguments (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify claim credibility rely on embedded knowledge or unreliable context. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval augmented fact verification through the synthesis of contrasting arguments (RAFTS) they use an embedding model to identify informative demonstrations and in-context prompts to generate the prediction and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods with smaller LLMs or unreliable contexts. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| 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. |
Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou, Zengrui Jin, Guanrou Yang, Tianrui Wang, Xu Tan, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model . |
QuZO: Quantized Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiajun Zhou, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ziyue Liu, Yequan Zhao, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Ngai Wong, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are quantized to lower precision to reduce memory cost and latency in inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantized zeroth-order framework for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using low-precision forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to first-order methods in FP8 and superior accuracy in INT8 and INT4 training. |
FLAT-LLM: Fine-grained Low-rank Activation Space Transformation for Large Language Model Compression (2026.findings-eacl)
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| 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)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
NUMINA: A Natural Understanding Benchmark for Multi-dimensional Intelligence and Numerical Reasoning Abilities (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Changyu Zeng, Yifan Wang, Zimu Wang, Wei Wang, Zhengni Yang, Muyi Bao, Jimin Xiao, Anh Nguyen, Yutao Yue
| Challenge: | Existing 3D benchmarks lack fine-grained numerical reasoning task annotations, limiting MLLMs’ ability to perform precise spatial measurements and complex numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D-based benchmark to enhance indoor perceptual understanding by using multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves indoor perceptual understanding by incorporating multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
ToolCPT: Improving Tool Utilization in LLM Agents via Continuous Pre-training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool knowledge for LLM-based agents during continuous pre-training . they curate 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on out-of-distribution tools on multiple benchmarks. |
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song, Longyu Guan, Qingxiu Dong, Rui Li, Yixin Yang, Yifan Pu, Weiyao Luo, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| 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)
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| 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)
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Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji
| 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)
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| 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. |
PRGC: Potential Relation and Global Correspondence Based Joint Relational Triple Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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Hengyi Zheng, Rui Wen, Xi Chen, Yifan Yang, Yunyan Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Ningyu Zhang, Bin Qin, Xu Ming, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Recent methods for extracting entities and relations from unstructured texts suffer from limitations, such as redundancy of relation prediction and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint relational triple extraction framework based on Potential Relation and Global Correspondence (PRGC) they propose overlapping triples for relation prediction and relation-relational alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks with higher efficiency and consistent performance gain on complex scenarios of overlapping triples. |
Making LLMs Better Many-to-Many Speech-to-Text Translators with Curriculum Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yexing Du, Youcheng Pan, Ziyang Ma, Bo Yang, Yifan Yang, Keqi Deng, Xie Chen, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing studies on English-centric translation tasks have focused on multimodal large language models, but the exploration of many-to-many translation is limited by the scarcity of parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage curriculum learning strategy that leverages the machine translation capabilities of large language models and adapts them to S2TT tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy achieves state-of-the-art average performance in 1514 language pairs, requiring fewer than 10 hours of speech data per language to achieve competitive results. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou, Ke Shi, Yifan Wang, Ran Le, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen, Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Yiming Jia, Dongsheng Wang, Tao Zhang, Lisi Chen, Yang Song, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks. |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| 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)
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Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| 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. |
ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rui Wang, Bohao Li, Xiyang Dai, Jianwei Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Zhen Xing, Yifan Yang, Dongdong Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| 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. |
Threshold-driven Pruning with Segmented Maximum Term Weights for Approximate Cluster-based Sparse Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using rank score thresholding, sparse retrieval skips the index at cluster and document levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning control scheme with a probabilistic guarantee on rank-safeness competitiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning control scheme improves accuracy and safeness while delivering low latency on single-threaded CPU. |
Video2Roleplay: A Multimodal Dataset and Framework for Video-Guided Role-playing Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RPAs focus on static role profiles, overlooking dynamic perceptual abilities inherent to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines adaptive temporal sampling with dynamic and static role profiles. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
MASTER: Multi-Agent Security Through Exploration of Roles and Topological Structures - A Comprehensive Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) exhibit remarkable problem-solving and task planning capabilities across diverse domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a security research framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems . they propose corresponding defense strategies to address MAS security risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework amplifies the severity of security risks under MAS attacks . it offers an automated construction process for different MAS setups and an interaction paradigm . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Paiheng Xu, Junda Wu, Jiaxin Yuan, Yifan Yang, Yuhang Zhou, Fuxiao Liu, Tianrui Guan, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in areas such as predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability. |
| Approach: | They evaluate or improve generative Large Language Models from a causal perspective in areas such as reasoning capacity, fairness and safety issues, explainability, and handling multimodality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to perform causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimation tasks. |
Tree-of-Code: A Self-Growing Tree Framework for End-to-End Code Generation and Execution in Complex Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Inducer-tuning: Connecting Prefix-tuning and Adapter-tuning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prefix-tuning is an essential paradigm of parameter-efficient transfer learning . fine-tuned models require separate copies of model parameters for each task . |
| Approach: | They propose to understand and further develop prefix-tuning through the kernel lens . they propose a new variant of prefix tuning that shares the exact mechanism as prefix tun . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves prefix-tuning performance by training only a small portion of parameters. |
Rethinking Token Reduction for State Space Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zheng Zhan, Yushu Wu, Zhenglun Kong, Changdi Yang, Yifan Gong, Xuan Shen, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for token reduction for SSMs lead to performance drops . a recent study shows that Mamba-2 improves the accuracy of the model by 5.7% to 13.1% . |
| Approach: | They propose a token reduction method that integrates token importance and similarity into SSMs and takes advantage of pruning and merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods while reducing computational demands and memory requirements. |
Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
From Mimesis to Metamorphosis: Evolving VLM Judges via In-Context Comparing and Knowledge Internalization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to subjective assessment are inconsistent and inconsistent due to inconsistent scales and inherent preference biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes subjective assessment as comparative analysis and internalizes it via Language Buttons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and is scale-steerable. |
Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li
| 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. |
Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| 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. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) using a constrained-category KIE track and an open-categorical KIE Track. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs show performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| 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. |
CONSTRUCTA: Automating Commercial Construction Schedules in Fabrication Facilities with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating construction scheduling are limited due to their domain knowledge and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework leveraging LLMs to optimize construction schedules in commercial construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves missing value prediction, dependency analysis and planning performance compared to baseline methods. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models are parameter efficient . fine- tuning the models requires multiple copies of the parameters, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to use kernel-based adapters to tune only a few parameters while freezing the rest of the parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve or improve strong performance over a diverse set of natural language generation and understanding tasks. |
HighMATH: Evaluating Math Reasoning of Large Language Models in Breadth and Depth (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yan Liu, Minghui Zhang, Bojian Xiong, Yifan Xiao, Yinong Sun, Yating Mei, Longyu Zeng, Jingchao Yang, Yang Wang, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a gap in math models' accuracy has been widened with the development of large language models (LLMs) . a new study aims to bridge this gap by evaluating a set of high-level math reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate large language models on existing math benchmarks to bridge this gap . they collect 5,293 problems from Chinese senior high school mathematics exams . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on o1-like models and a high-level model. |
Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic Framework for Robust Text-based Person Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a large-scale visionlanguage pre-training framework is limited by the scarcity of large-sized annotated vision-language data . noise-resistant data construction pipeline is needed to filter and caption web-sourced images . noisy text tokens can be a problem for fine-grained representation learning . |
| Approach: | They develop a noise-resistant data construction pipeline that leverages in-context learning capabilities of MLLMs to automatically filter and caption web-sourced images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-modal alignment by masking noisy textual tokens based on the gradient-attention similarity score. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| 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 . |
Sketching as a Tool for Understanding and Accelerating Self-attention for Long Sequences (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for long sequences are not efficient due to the quadratic space and time complexity of the self-attention modules. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce the quadratic complexity to linear (modulo logarithmic factors) by low-dimensional projection and row selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform transformer-based models with smaller time/space footprint on the Long Range Arena benchmark. |
Exploring Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning (2025.coling-main)
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Bingchan Zhao, Xinyi Liu, Zhuocheng Yu, Tongchen Yang, Yifan Song, Mingyu Jin, Sujian Li, Yizhou Wang
| 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. |
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| 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. |
Communication-Efficient and Tensorized Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in translation and summarization due to the capabilities of transformer architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate tensorized adapters into model encoder/decoder blocks to improve model adaptability against data heterogeneity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large-scale cross-device FL and large-silo FL show that the proposed methods perform on par or even better than existing federated PEFT approaches while reducing communication cost. |
ELABORATION: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Human-LLM Competitive Programming (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-LLM competitive programming use scattered, application-specific human feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark pinpoints strengths and weaknesses of existing methods and will be openly released. |
Render-of-Thought: Rendering Textual Chain-of-Thought as Images for Visual Latent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| 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)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions (2024.naacl-long)
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| 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. |
DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing ESC data entangles psychological strategies and response content, making it difficult to construct high-quality preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Decoupled ESC framework that decomposes the ESC task into two sequential subtasks: strategy planning and empathic response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines, reducing preference bias and improving response quality. |
LoRASC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules . they propose 143 tasks and a GUITestBench benchmark that features 26 defects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in 143 tasks and 26 defects. |
WebSynthesis: World Model-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for Efficient WebAgent Trajectory Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled increasingly capable web agents . however, training such agents at scale still relies on high-quality interaction trajectories that are difficult to obtain at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scalable trajectory synthesis that simulates state transitions without network dependencies and integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search to enable reversible exploration over the simulated state space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebArena, WebVoyager, and Mind2Web-Online show that agents trained exclusively on synthesized trajectories outperform those trained on real-world data. |
MaZO: Masked Zeroth-Order Optimization for Multi-Task Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhen Zhang, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning requires significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a ZO-based framework that eliminates the need for backpropagation and provides a memory-efficient alternative to backprograming. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses first-order methods in performance and accuracy. |
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Zhichao Yang, Gen Li, Ye Qiu, Zhaoxin Fan, Yifan Sun, Wenjun wu, Jin Dong, Xiaotie Deng
| Challenge: | Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead. |
Compact Token Representations with Contextual Quantization for Efficient Document Re-ranking (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has adopted a late interaction architecture with pre-computed contextual token representations at the cost of a large online storage. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document-specific and document-independent ranking contributions during codebook-based compression for effective online decompression and embedding composition for better search relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high relevance and space efficiency with minimal computational cost and low computational complexity. |
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
LoRETTA: Low-Rank Economic Tensor-Train Adaptation for Ultra-Low-Parameter Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning are limited by the growing number of trainable parameters with the rapid deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient framework that reduces trainable parameters through tensor-train decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve comparable or better performance than most widely used methods with up to 100 fewer parameters on the LLaMA-2-7B models. |
Lock on Target! Precision Unlearning via Directional Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning harmful, sensitive, or outdated knowledge suffer from two critical limitations: (1) collateral forgetting, where erasing target data inadvertently removes related but desirable knowledge, and (2) generality forgetting degrades the model’s general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that identifies and leverages a targeted "unlearning direction" in the model's parameter space and selectively updates along this direction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art unlearning precision while preserving both related knowledge and general capabilities. |
Training LLMs for Optimization Modeling via Iterative Data Synthesis and Structured Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising tool for OR, but they face challenges when dealing with complex problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments existing datasets and generates high-quality fine-tuning data tailored to OR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments existing datasets and generates high-quality fine-tuning data . it prevents error propagation and ensures the quality of the generated dataset . |
Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| 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. |
Polymorphic Universal Transformer (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Zitian Gao, Yihao Xiao, Jason Klein Liu, Xinyu Yang, Yifan Luo, Haoming Luo, Zhengmao Ye, Tingwen Liu, Ran Tao, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Compute Distribution Skew is a pathological phenomenon in ultra-deep recurrent models . it causes over-smoothing, representation rank collapse, and degraded reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture that redefines recursive computation by decoupling parameter count from depth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves representation rank and reasoning robustness while reducing computation by 64.7%. |
Target-to-Source Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
EHRAG: Bridging Semantic Gaps in Lightweight GraphRAG via Hybrid Hypergraph Construction and Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing lightweight approaches to retrieval-augmented generation fail to capture latent semantic connections between disjoint entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight RAG framework that constructs a hypergraph capturing both structure and semantic relationships using a hybrid structural-semantic retrieval mechanism. |
| Outcome: | EHRAG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets while maintaining zero token consumption. |
From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Beining Wu, Fuyou Mao, Jiong Lin, Cheng Yang, Jiaxuan Lu, Yifu Guo, Siyu Zhang, Yifan Wu, Ying Huang, Fu Li
| 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. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |