Papers by Yin Wang
Disentangling Reasoning Capabilities from Language Models with Compositional Reasoning Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ReasonFormer is a unified reasoning framework for complex decision-making . it is based on the dual-process theory of cognitive science, where two cognitive systems interact to form a whole reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified reasoning framework that mirrors the modular reasoning process of humans . they decouple the representation module and the reasoning modules to capture different levels of cognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that humans can perform better in complex decision-making tasks. |
RoleCDE: Benchmarking and Mitigating Role–Alignment Trade-offs in Role-Playing Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for role-playing agents only evaluate surface-level fidelity and provide limited insight into decision making under role–alignment value conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RPAs under role–alignment value conflicts . they use 8k diverse role profiles and 240k dilemma instances to evaluate role-aware decision making . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 8k diverse role profiles and scenarios and nearly 240k dilemma instances across three difficulty levels and eight role categories. |
Rhetorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Detection with Counterfactual Data Augmentation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sarcasm is a complex form of sentiment expression widely used in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a device-aware sarcasm dataset with counterfactually augmented data to capture its complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that it is more balanced than zero-shot models. |
UserAdapter: Few-Shot User Learning in Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Adapting a model to a handful of personalized data is challenging, authors say . standard fine-tuning requires hundreds of millions of parameters for each user . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight method that clamps millions of parameters of a Transformer model and optimizes a tiny user-specific vector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on Yelp and IMDB datasets and reduces the number of parameters added for each user. |
Multiview Clickbait Detection via Jointly Modeling Subjective and Objective Preference (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing clickbait detection models rely on analyzing the objective semantics of posts or correlating posts with article content only, but fail to identify and exploit the manipulation intention of clickbaiting from a user’s subjective perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a multiview clickbait detection model to model subjective and objective preferences simultaneously to capture clickbaiting from a user's subjective perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two real-world datasets and shows that it integrates subjective and objective preferences simultaneously. |
TOP-Training: Target-Oriented Pretraining for Medical Extractive Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e-health records underscore the growing significance of information extraction (IE) from these datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a target-oriented pre-training paradigm for extractive question-answering in the medical domain . TOP-Training moves one step further than popular domain-oriented fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the Medical-EQA benchmarks. |
Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chengwu Liu, Ye Yuan, Yichun Yin, Yan Xu, Xin Xu, Zaoyu Chen, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a step-aware formal verification framework Safe to address hallucinations in CoT prompting . they propose 'formal step' as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. |
Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhong-Zhi Li, Xiao Liang, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing W, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Yeyun Gong, Zhijiang Guo, Xiao Liu, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Extended Chain-of-Thought (EFT) to reduce the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
MaPPER: Multimodal Prior-guided Parameter Efficient Tuning for Referring Expression Comprehension (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) lack specific domain abilities for precise local visual perception and visual-language alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning to localize a visual region via natural language using a prior-guided prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the best accuracy compared to the current methods with only 1.41% tunable backbone parameters. |
Gödel Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursively Self-Improvement (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems cannot search the whole design space due to the restriction of human-designed components. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gödel Agent framework that allows agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on fixed algorithms or fixed algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses manual crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Retrieval Models Aren’t Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from inherent inabilities to interact with the physical world and access vast, up-to-date knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool retrieval benchmark for large language models (LLMs) that includes 7.6k diverse retrieval tasks and a corpus of 43k tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the heterogeneous tool retrieval benchmark, resulting in low pass rate and low retrieval quality. |
Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains, but how their safety benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-aware reasoning paradigm that integrates a pivot token-based safety-based reasoning mechanism into LLMs’ generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the safety of large language models against jailbreak queries while minimizing attacks and maintaining the original performance. |
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. |
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR) however, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Collaborative Ranking framework (CoRanking) for LLM-based listwise ranking based on large language models with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ranking latency by approximately 70% while improving effectiveness compared to the standalone large reranker. |
Generating Commonsense Reasoning Questions with Controllable Complexity through Multi-step Structural Composition (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work mainly learns to map text into questions, lacking a mechanism to control results with desired complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel controllable framework to generate QGs with desired complexity using contextual and commonsense clues from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate complex questions with desired complexity levels. |
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou, Zhen Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhengzhong Liu, Haojian Jin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | closed-ended question-based benchmarks struggle with saturation as newer models emerge . crowd-sourced leaderboards rely on costly and slow human judges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages collective intelligence from all large language models to evaluate each other. |
| Outcome: | a new framework enables a democratic, pairwise evaluation of all large language models . it achieves 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost. |
SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang, null Wenhanlin, Shunshun Yin, Ming Tao, Xinsheng Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization that disentangles semantic and acousian modeling into two dedicated streams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenizers in auto-propagating text-to-speech models. |
RepoDistill: Distilling Repository Knowledge through Compression-Aware Budget Allocation and Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have strong performance on code translation tasks, but they struggle with repository-level scenarios where context is extensive and interdependent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval with learning budget allocation for fine-grained context compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on SWE-QA, CoderEval, and LongCodeU. |
UnCo: Uncertainty-Driven Collaborative Framework of Large and Small Models for Grounded Multimodal NER (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify unseen multimodal entities struggle with limited knowledge and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the strengths of small fine-tuned models and MLLMs to generate unambiguous predictions. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework retains the in-domain knowledge of small models while utilizing the capabilities of MLLMs to handle unseen entities. |
Magnet: Multi-turn Tool-use Data Synthesis and Distillation via Graph Translation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fan Yin, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Ke Jiang, Yanfei Chen, Jindong Gu, Long Le, Kai-Wei Chang, Chen-Yu Lee, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Large language models have been shown to be effective in multi-turn interactions . however, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turned interactions involving users and multiple tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model by 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery. |
Token Prepending: A Training-Free Approach for Eliciting Better Sentence Embeddings from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on prompt engineering to extract sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) but these models are mostly decoder-only and the earlier tokens in the sentence cannot attend to the latter, resulting in biased encoding of sentence information and cascading effects on the final decoded token. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play and training-free technique that prepends each layer’s decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer’ s input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can significantly improve the performance of existing prompt-based sentence embedding methods across different LLMs while incurring negligible additional inference cost. |
I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e-commerce and recommender systems lack a framework for personalized generation . a new framework extracts tags from multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts tags from multimodal information and rewrites item description . they then use a decoupled text-to-text and image-to image retriever to search for similar item text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate results aligned with user preferences . it can be used in e-commerce and recommender systems to win over diverse user base . |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lingrui Mei, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Yuyao Ge, Baolong Bi, Jiayu Yao, Jun Wan, Ziling Yin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Long contexts break transformers, attention scores dilute, model cannot adapt to novel patterns at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that gates the memory consolidation process by estimating Contextual Utility . they propose GDWM to maintain a form of working memory with constant contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance on sparse-information tasks with 4 fewer gradient steps compared to uniform baselines. |
A Tree-based Decoder for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on adding syntactic information to NMT systems is limited to linguistically-inspired tree structures. |
| Approach: | They propose an NMT model that can naturally generate the topology of an arbitrary tree structure on the target side. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard seq2seq models by 2.1 BLEU points and other methods for incorporating target-side syntax by 0.7 BLUE points. |
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
IterAlign: Iterative Constitutional Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that iterAlign improves truthfulness, helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty, improving the LLM alignment by up to 13.5% in harmlessness. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven constitution discovery and self-alignment framework called IterAlign to overcome these drawbacks by leveraging red teaming to uncover weaknesses of an LLM. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that iterAlign improves truthfulness, helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty by up to 13.5%. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu, Haodong Wang, Hyokun Yun, Ming Zeng, Pei Chen, Zhihan Zhang, Yifan Gao, Ruijie Wang, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| 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. |
Learning distributed sentence vectors with bi-directional 3D convolutions (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods that render words or characters into images separately, but instead use text's visual features as input, we use 3-dimensional convolutions to learn distributed sentence representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text's visual features as input to learn distributed sentence representation using 3-dimensional sentence tensors and multiple 3-dimensional convolutions with different lengths are applied to the sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on several downstream natural language processing tasks. |
KIA: Knowledge-Guided Implicit Vision-Language Alignment for Chest X-Ray Report Generation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reports on medical images and reports lack fine-grained cross-modal interaction, leading to insufficient understanding of detailed information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for establishing cross-modal semantic alignment in radiology report pairs using knowledge-guided implicit vision-language alignment. |
| Outcome: | KIA improves understanding of medical images and reports by incorporating medical knowledge to enhance pathological observation and anatomical landm. |
Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with Constraints (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models with search capabilities often exhibit miscalibrated confidence, causing incorrect answers with high certainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-primary framework that integrates search operations into chain-of-thought generation while maintaining explicit confidence calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reliability of large language models with search capabilities. |
A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junyu Luo, Bohan Wu, Xiao Luo, Zhiping Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Rong-Cheng Tu, Nan Yin, Yifan Wang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | achieving data-efficient post-training of Large Language Models is a key research question. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of data-efficient LLM post-training methods from a data-centric perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods cover data selection, data quality enhancement, synthetic data generation, data distillation and compression, and self-evolving data ecosystems. |
DualNER: A Dual-Teaching framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) are limited to high-resource languages like English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to make full use of annotated source and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes full use of both annotated source and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER). |
ATFormer: A Learned Performance Model with Transfer Learning Across Devices for Deep Learning Tensor Programs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Compilation-based methods with performance models have poor measurement accuracy and transferability between platforms. |
| Approach: | They propose a compiler that automatically generates tensors and automatically tunes them for different hardware platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces inference time and costs on modern DNN benchmarks. |
A Survey on LLMs for Story Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Maria Teleki, Vedangi Bengali, Xiangjue Dong, Sai Tejas Janjur, Haoran Liu, Tian Liu, Cong Wang, Ting Liu, Yin Zhang, Frank Shipman, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Methods for story generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) have come into the spotlight recently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel taxonomy of LLMs for story generation consisting of two major paradigms: independent story generation by an LLM, and author-assistance for story creation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy compares existing work on the topic with those of novel author-assistance models. |
ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wanjun Zhong, Yifan Gao, Ning Ding, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ming Zhou, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing QA research on question answering is focused on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves QA-centric ability on 11 QA benchmarks. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
BatchMixup: Improving Training by Interpolating Hidden States of the Entire Mini-batch (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a data augmentation technique is used to augment data, but it has two drawbacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new mixup paradigm that generates new points scattered throughout the whole mini-batch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of NLP tasks while using different ratios of training data. |
UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuzhe Liang, Yuxin Guo, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Yushen Chen, Ruibo Fu, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Generative audio modeling has been fragmented into specialized tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text- to-music (TTM), and text-ta (TTA) specialized models require reference audio for timbre cloning and strict phoneme alignment, whereas TTA models generate unstructured textures from open-ended captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, sound effects . they propose 'token injection mechanism' that projects unstructured environmental sounds into structured temporal latent space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS and TTM while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Zero Pronoun Resolution with Attention-based Neural Network (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent neural network methods for zero pronoun resolution use contextual information to encode the zero pronomins since they contain no actual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-attention mechanism for encoding zero pronouns that focus on some informative parts of the associated texts and produce an efficient way of encode them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly surpasses existing Chinese zero pronoun resolution baseline systems. |
UnClE: Explicitly Leveraging Semantic Similarity to Reduce the Parameters of Word Embeddings (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce word embedding parameters ignore semantic information . existing methods do not consider semantic information, allowing for performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages semantic similarity with weight sharing to reduce dimensionality of word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces word embedding parameters by more than 11x on a standard English-German dataset. |
Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as medicine and law . current LLM performance in closed domain is lacking, even on traditional tasks such as Natural Language Inference . |
| Approach: | They investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift . they find that LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly in extractive question answering tasks under domain drift . the proposed model can generalize to domains that require specific knowledge without training . |
Eliciting Implicit Acoustic Styles from Open-domain Instructions to Facilitate Fine-grained Controllable Generation of Speech (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current work relies on pre-defined rules or templates to control the style of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-domain instructions to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on their instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on open-domain instructions. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu
| 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. |
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yuping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Xiaomingbot is a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four inte- gal capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates Chinese news, then reads it in multiple languages and generates an animated avatar reading it. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering Dataset (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent LLMs like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 have made tremendous progress in solving fundamental math problems like GSM8K by achieving over 90% accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use theorem-driven question-answering dataset to evaluate AI models' ability to apply theoretic concepts to solving challenging science problems. |
| Outcome: | TheoremQA is curated by domain experts and contains 800 high-quality questions covering 350 theoremics from Math, Physics, EE&CS, and Finance. |
An Efficient Framework for Whole-Page Reranking via Single-Modal Supervision (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Zishuai Zhang, Sihao Yu, null Xiewenyi, Ying Nie, Junfeng Wang, Zhiming Zheng, Dawei Yin, Hainan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing whole-page reranking methods require large-scale expert annotations to achieve high-quality results. |
| Approach: | They propose a whole-page reranking framework that converts single-modal rankers into page-level guidance by constructing budget-aware candidates for cross-modal annotations and distilling intra-modality preferences to align relevance scales across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation costs by 70-90% while outperforming fully-annotated reranking baselines. |
Aggregating Multiple Heuristic Signals as Supervision for Unsupervised Automated Essay Scoring (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automated Essay Scoring (AES) aims to evaluate the quality score of input essays without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to evaluate the quality of input essays . they use multiple heuristic quality signals as pseudo-groundtruths to train a neural AES model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight prompts of ASPA dataset compared with previous unsupervised methods . |
A Multilingual Dataset and Empirical Validation for the Mutual Reinforcement Effect in Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chengguang Gan, Sunbowen Lee, Qingyu Yin, Yunhao Liang, Xinyang He, Hanjun Wei, Younghun Lim, Shijian Wang, Hexiang Huang, QingHao Zhang, Shiwen Ni, Tatsunori Mori
| Challenge: | Existing work on the Mutual Reinforcement Effect in information extraction has not been empirically validated . 76 percent of the 21 sub-datasets exhibit the Mutual Reforcement effect across languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual MRE mix dataset that integrates 21 sub-datasets covering English, Japanese, and Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces manual annotation effort while preserving structural requirements of MRE tasks. |
Low-Resource Generation of Multi-hop Reasoning Questions (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate valid and fluent questions from text are limited and insufficient for training. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate multi-hop reasoning questions from the raw text in a low resource circumstance by deducing over multiple relations on several sentences in the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to the task of machine reading comprehension and achieve significant performance improvements. |
LLM-REDIAL: A Large-Scale Dataset for Conversational Recommender Systems Created from User Behaviors with LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing CRS datasets suffer from data inextensibility and semantic inconsistency . |
| Approach: | They introduce the LLM-REDIAL dataset to facilitate the research in CRS by leveraging large language models to generate high-quality dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest multi-domain CRS dataset which consists of 47.6k multi-turn dialogues with 482.6k utterances across 4 domains. |
IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Haodong Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yichuan Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| 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. |
Automatic Keyphrase Generation by Incorporating Dual Copy Mechanisms in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for keyphrase generation use a copy mechanism to generate keyphrases, but they do not identify key words in the source text and copy them to create more keyphrase. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-copier keyphrase generation model that uses a sequence-to-sequence model to generate keyphrases for a piece of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves an obvious performance improvement. |
Learning Language-guided Adaptive Hyper-modality Representation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) is effective when using rich information from multiple sources, but the potential sentiment-irrelevant information across modalities may hinder the performance from being further improved. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Language-guided Multimodal Transformer (ALMT) that learns an irrelevance/conflict-suppressing representation from visual and audio features under guidance of language features at different scales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on several popular datasets and an abundance of ablation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai, Zhenfei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks, but in long trajectories, agents often invoke tools excessively or inappropriately, increasing computation cost and derailing the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entropy reduction as a supervisory signal to reduce tool calls . they propose to design two reward strategies to address the needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward strategies reduce tool calls by 72.07% and improve performance by 22.27%. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| 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. |
Adversarial Yet Cooperative: Multi-Perspective Reasoning in Retrieved-Augmented Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large reasoning models with retrieval-augmented generation to improve reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for query expansion lack corpus-specific knowledge and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-query-document generation method that leverages large language models for mutual verification to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is fully zero-shot and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. |
Towards Database-Free Text-to-SQL Evaluation: A Graph-Based Metric for Functional Correctness (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Zhan, Longjie Cui, Han Weng, Guifeng Wang, Yu Tian, Boyi Liu, Yingxiang Yang, Xiaoming Yin, Jiajun Xie, Yang Sun
| Challenge: | Existing metrics for evaluating functional correctness of SQL queries are prone to false positives due to inadequately prepared test databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based metric that uses a relational operator tree to extract rich semantic information from the logical execution plan of SQL queries and embed it into a diagram. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the need for extensive test database preparation and performs graph matching on unseen SQL queries. |
Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) relying on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional embeddables, resulting in degradation of quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of prompt-based methods on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets. |
RepoGenesis: Benchmarking End-to-End Microservice Generation from Readme to Repository (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Ran Jia, Xu Chen, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated function/class-level generation, neglecting complete microservice repository generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark for repository-level end-to-end web microservice generation that reflects real-world development workflows. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared 106 repositories across 18 domains and 11 frameworks and 1,258 API endpoints and 2,335 test cases. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
RACQC: Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chinese Query Correction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jinbo Su, Lingzhe Gao, Wei Li, Shihao Liu, Haojie Lei, Xinyi Wang, Yuanzhao Guo, Ke Wang, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across many tasks, but face critical challenges in the CSC scenario: (1) poor generalization to rare entities in open-domain searches; and (2) failure to adapt to temporal entity variations due to static parameters, resulting in serious over-correction issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Spelling Check system with RAG and multi-task learning that integrates dynamic knowledge retrieval and entity-centric RAG to address rare entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing baselines in the CSC task and achieves a maximum improvement of +9.92% on the search scenario benchmark and +3.2% on the general-domain dataset. |
Multimodal Clickbait Detection by De-confounding Biases Using Causal Representation Inference (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new method to detect clickbait posts on the Web is needed to detect such posts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect clickbait posts on the Web using latent factors . they use features in multiple modalities to characterize the posts and causal inference to eliminate noise . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect clickbait posts on popular social media platforms with good generalization ability. |
Are Message Passing Neural Networks Really Helpful for Knowledge Graph Completion? (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are far from complete with large portions of triplets missing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Graph Neural Networks to learn powerful embeddings to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve comparable performance to MLP models, suggesting that MP may not be as crucial as previously thought. |
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
One Cannot Stand for Everyone! Leveraging Multiple User Simulators to train Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that Task-oriented Dialogue systems can be more suitable for human users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to optimize ToD systems by leveraging Multiple User SimulaTors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on multiWOZ with human evaluations and automatic evaluations. |
On-policy Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Offline reward for Multi-step Embodied Planning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and verbal goals. |
| Approach: | They propose an On-policy Reinforcement fine-tuning framework with offline rewards for Embodied Task Planning that preserves generalization benefits of RFT while addressing costly interaction and sparse rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source and online-RL methods on EmbodiedBench, a recent benchmark for interactive embodied tasks. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weiwei Sun, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing work utilizes generative LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. |
| Approach: | They investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR and use a test set to verify the model’s ability to rank unknown knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. |
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang
| Challenge: | LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases . |
| Approach: | They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to quantization of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted due to activation outliers, which degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric for quantization that strategically distributes outlier magnitudes across matrix dimensions via optimized diagonal operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model and reduces the performance gap by 39.1% on the more challenging W2A4KV16 model. |
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt. |
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lirong Gao, Zewei Yu, Zhongrui Yin, Qi Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Sheng Guo
| Challenge: | Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. |
Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing transformer models are computationally demanding and prohibitively costly for long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of its selfattention module. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model that inherits weights from large pretrained models by removing redundancies in hidden sequences using the ready-made Fast Fourier Transform operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the standard BART model on the long-range modeling benchmark LRA with significant improvements in speed and space. |
Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for shaping large reasoning models rely on reinforcement learning or fine-tuning with gold-standard reasoning traces. Existing techniques for behavior shaping rely only on additional reward modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns a model's self-concept with a target belief blueprint and internalizes desired traits by fine-tuning on synthesized, self-reflective QA pairs that affirm the target belief. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms behavior-supervised and preference-based models while requiring significantly lower training costs. |
TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models (LLMs) focus on basic plan validity, but neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning that integrates retrieved trajectories with LLMs’ intrinsic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality while challenging universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data. |
Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance on downstream tasks, but instruction tuning may overfit them to specific task formats, compromising their generalization on unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject latent task adaptation and knowledge reinstatement into large language models to mitigate spurious correlations between inputs and targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization on in-domain and out-of-domain unseen tasks. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hy Dang, Tianyi Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Tao Yang, Pei Chen, Zhengyang Wang, Helen Wang, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents. |
Morpheme Sense Disambiguation: A New Task Aiming for Understanding the Language at Character Level (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Morphemes are a strong linguistic feature to capture lexical semantics, but lack of morpheme-informed resources and the expense of manual annotations hinder morphme-enhanced methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Morpheme Sense Disambiguation with two subtasks in-text and in-word to generalize morpheme features on more tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are based on two morpheme-annotated datasets for Chinese . the best model yields a promising precision of 77.66% on in-text and 88.19% on in word . |
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang
| 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. |
Lunar-Bench: Towards Evaluating Task-Oriented Reasoning of LLMs in Lunar Exploration Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on static, context-independent reasoning tasks and fail to capture constraints and dependencies of lunar missions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the task-oriented reasoning and decision-making performance of large language models through 3,000 tasks derived from mission procedures and documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 47.8% accuracy compared with 65.1% for human experts on 36 representative missions. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao Embedding: Logical Query Embeddings with Local Comparison and Global Transport (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for answering complex queries on knowledge graphs lack a local and global scoring function. |
| Approach: | They propose a convolution-based algorithm for linear time computation and a block diagonal kernel to enforce the trade-off between local and global embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on standard datasets, evaluation sets with combinatorially complex queries, and hierarchical knowledge graphs. |
PromISe: Releasing the Capabilities of LLMs with Prompt Introspective Search (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models use uniform manual prompts, resulting in underestimation of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt introspective search framework that integrates self-introspect and self-refine to unlock the capabilities of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the performance of 12 well-known LLMs compared to baseline methods. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
Enhancing LLM Capabilities Beyond Scaling Up (2024.emnlp-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | general-purpose large language models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and access to unpublic training data. |
| Approach: | This tutorial aims to examine the capabilities of general-purpose large language models . authors discuss adaptation of LLMs to address conflicts, defense against attacks . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to examine the evolution of general-purpose large language models (LLMs) the authors argue that the evolution is dependent on the availability of training data and the scale of the models. |
UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models for programming languages have demonstrated great success on code intelligence . however, such pre-tried models are sub-optimal for auto-regressive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming language that leverages cross-module contents like AST and code comment to enhance code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on most code-related tasks and compares with existing models on zero-shot code-to-code search. |
Original Content Is All You Need! an Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Liang Wen, Juan Li, Houfeng Wang, Yingwei Luo, Xiaolin Wang, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhicong Cheng, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing answer selection approaches for community question answering lack additional answer summaries due to redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. |
| Approach: | They constructed a dataset which contains a corresponding reference summary for each original lengthy answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of a question and candidate answer on a WikiHowQA dataset. |
CHROMIC: Chronological Reasoning Across Multi-Panel Comics (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bingxuan Hou, Jiayi Lin, Chenyang Zhang, Dapeng Yin, Shuyue Zhu, Qingqing Hong, Mengna Gao, Junli Wang
| Challenge: | Large-scale vision–language models have achieved remarkable progress on various reasoning tasks, but most studies focus on natural photographic images and pay limited attention to multi-panel visual narratives such as comics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for chronological reasoning in multi-panel comics that covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles. |
Reasoning Over Semantic-Level Graph for Fact Checking (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact checking use string concatenation or fusing features of isolated evidence sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method suitable for reasoning about the semantic-level structure of evidence . they use graph convolutional network and graph attention network to exploit the structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves claim verification accuracy and FEVER score on a benchmark dataset. |
Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Alexander Bukharin, Shiyang Li, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Bing Yin, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoming Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to control diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets and validate it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly improves worst and average case performance on large scale instruction tuning datasets. |
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Pan, Rui Yang, Han Wang, Zhuan Zhou, Xuming He, Wenxiang Guo, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Li, Yu Zhang, Chenyuhao Wen, Ke Lei, Xiang Yin, Jingyu Lu, Zhiyuan Zhu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
Improving Deep Embedded Clustering via Learning Cluster-level Representations (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to learn meaningful representations at the instance level are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep embedded clustering model with cluster-level representation learning to jointly learn cluster and instance level representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces meaningful clusters on real-world short text datasets. |
StruNRAG: Evaluation of OCR-Induced Structural Noise on RAG Robustness (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of RAG systems ignore structural noise, authors say . complex layouts can cause OCR failures and disrupt semantic flow of text . advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption that fragments global context. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RAG robustness against OCR-induced structural perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically injects three categories of real-world structural noise into a bilingual dataset of 2,132 question-answer pairs . results show that advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption . |
Cautious Next Token Prediction (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yizhou Wang, Lingzhi Zhang, Yue Bai, Mang Tik Chiu, Zhengmian Hu, Mingyuan Zhang, Qihua Dong, Yu Yin, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Yun Fu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding autoregressive models are temperature scaling and nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free decoding strategy that uses a model with a low perplexity score to select the trial with the lowest perplexities as the most probable and reliable path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. |
RIPRAG: Hack a Black-box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Question-Answering System with Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate RAG documents require knowledge of the target RAG system’s internal composition and implementation details, whereas black-box methods are unable to utilize interactive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a RIPRAG attack framework that treats the target RAG system as a black box and leverages a Reinforcement Learning from Black-box Feedback (RLBF) method to optimize the generation model for poisoned documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an attack success rate (ASR) improvement of up to 0.72 compared to baseline methods. |
CMMaTH: A Chinese Multi-modal Math Skill Evaluation Benchmark for Foundation Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongzhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Pei-Jie Wang, Jian Xu, Rui-Song Zhang, Yin Fei, Zhi-Long Ji, Jin-Feng Bai, Zhen-Ru Pan, Jiaxin Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various language tasks, while large multimodal models effectively handle visual-language problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal multimodal model evaluation benchmark to evaluate model performance in Chinese K12 classrooms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluation tool is integrated with the CMMaTH dataset. |
NetSafe: Exploring the Topological Safety of Multi-agent System (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Miao Yu, Shilong Wang, Guibin Zhang, Junyuan Mao, Chenlong Yin, Qijiong Liu, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have fueled significant progress in intelligent Multi-agent Systems (MAS), with expanding academic and industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis. |
UIOrchestra: Generating High-Fidelity Code from UI Designs with a Multi-agent System (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chuhuai Yue, Jiajun Chai, Yufei Zhang, Zixiang Ding, Xihao Liang, Peixin Wang, Shihai Chen, Wang Yixuan, null Wangyanping, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have significantly improved automated code generation . however, the translation of complex mobile UI designs into high-fidelity front-end code remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative multi-agent system to reconstruct static single-page apps from mockups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods in reconstructing complex app pages . the code and data will be released upon paper acceptance . |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haotian Xu, Yue Hu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chen Gao, Ziyou Wang, Junreng Rao, Wenhao Lu, Weishi Li, Quanjun Yin, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on indoor or street settings, overlooking challenges of open-ended urban spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to probe cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities of current VLMs in urban settings. |
| Outcome: | The citycube benchmark examines the performance of current vision-language models in urban environments. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
Memorize Step by Step: Efficient Long-Context Prefilling with Incremental Memory and Decremental Chunk (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoran Liu, Zhangyue Yin, Wentao Shu, Mianqiu Huang, Bo Wang, Yunhua Zhou, Linlin Li, Qun Liu, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize LLM for long sequences for long documents are slow and consume memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts with a small memory size and gradually increases it . they propose Decremental Chunk based on Incremental Memory (IMDC) which reduces chunk size while increasing memory size . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is faster (1.45x) and reduces GPU memory consumption by 23.3% compared to fixed-size memory. |
Training-free LLM Merging for Multi-task Learning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Shanshan Ye, Hongzhi Yin, Yi Chang, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method for unifying different specialized LLMs into a single model using model-wise and layer-wise pruning and scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing merging techniques and surpasses models fine-tuned on combined datasets in most scenarios. |
PARADE: A New Dataset for Paraphrase Identification Requiring Computer Science Domain Knowledge (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Paraphrase identification requires specialized domain knowledge to perform . state-of-the-art neural models and non-expert human annotators have poor performance on PARADE . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset called PARADE for paraphrase identification that requires specialized domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows state-of-the-art models and non-expert human annotators have poor performance on PARADE. |
WYWEB: A NLP Evaluation Benchmark For Classical Chinese (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for classical Chinese are inadequate to evaluate performance of different NLP models. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation benchmark for classical Chinese NLP, which evaluates existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of existing models in classical Chinese. |
Generating Deep Questions with Commonsense Reasoning Ability from the Text by Disentangled Adversarial Inference (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense question generation produce shallow questions that can be answered by simple word matching. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of commonsense question generation that aims to yield deep-level questions from the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can yield deep-level and to-the-point questions from the text. |
Enhancing Transformers for Generalizable First-Order Logical Entailment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianshi Zheng, Jiazheng Wang, Zihao Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Hang Yin, Zheye Deng, Yangqiu Song, Jianxin Li
| Challenge: | Moreover, transformers have demonstrated proficiency in logical reasoning over natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-aware architecture that improves the performance in generalizable first-order logical entailment by combining distribution shifts and unseen knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms methods designed specifically for knowledge graph query answering on a dataset with a large dataset. |
Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Evolving Memory and Self-Reflection (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually incorrect information, also known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for verifiable text generation with evolving memory and self-reflection that incorporates long-term memory to retain documents and recent documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses, but their robustness is still far from optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage training framework that helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework improves diversity and aligns the model with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Efficient KL Divergence Estimation via Truncated Top-K Integration for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating KL divergence using only top-k tokens suffer from high variance or systematic bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k Importance-weighted KL Estimator that exploits the Zipfian structure of language model distributions by integrating only the top-K tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed estimator outperforms existing estimators on multiple benchmarks while exhibiting lower variance. |
CaM-HG: Causal-Enhanced MoE and Hypergraphs Network for Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods that focus on statistical reconstruction often fail to bridge these gaps, effectively leaving semantic holes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Causal-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts and Hypergraph Network to bridge missing features . they use experts to synthesize missing features that are realistic and causally consistent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes missing features that are realistic and causally consistent . it surpasses benchmarks on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU MOSEI by 1.43% and 1.25% . |
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for listwise passage ranking use sliding window approach, which is inefficient as it requires repetitive and serialized processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a listwise label construction approach and importance-aware learning objective for full ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in listwise ranking tasks. |
Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Yuanpu Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models are less applicable to open-ended conversations with users. |
| Approach: | They propose a shadow-activated backdoor attack scenario where attackers inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy. |
Geoparsing: Diagram Parsing for Plane and Solid Geometry with a Unified Formal Language (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Peijie Wang, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Cao, Chao Deng, Dekang Ran, Pi Bu, Hongda Sun, Xuan Zhang, Yingyao Wang, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various vision reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified formal language that integrates plane and solid geometry, comprehensively covering geometric structures and semantic relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language achieves state-of-the-art parsing performance and significantly boosts MLLMs’ capabilities for downstream geometry reasoning tasks. |
AutoSearch: Adaptive Search Depth for Efficient Agentic RAG via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jingbo Sun, Wenyue Chong, Songjun Tu, Qichao Zhang, Yaocheng Zhang, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin, Dongbin Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work limits search depth to reduce cost, but this often leads to underexploration of complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that evaluates each search step via self-generated intermediate answers. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that AutoSearch achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, alleviating over-searching while preserving search quality. |
DT-Solver: Automated Theorem Proving with Dynamic-Tree Sampling Guided by Proof-level Value Function (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haiming Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Jing Xiong, Enze Xie, Han Shi, Yujun Li, Lin Li, Jian Yin, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural theorem-proving resort to large language models and tree searches. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic-Tree Driven Theorem Solver to accommodate general theoremes by guiding the search procedure with state confidence and proof-level values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular theorem-proving datasets with a 6.65% improvement on average in terms of success rate. |
TransLLM: A Unified Multi-Task Large Language Model for Urban Transportation via Learnable Prompting (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models lack generalization capabilities and lack structured spatiotemporal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified multi-task framework that synergizes spatiotemporal encoding with LLM reasoning through learnable prompt composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on seven datasets and three tasks on supervised and zero-shot settings with excellent generalization and robustness. |
FPT: Improving Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Progressive Training (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent prompt tuning (PT) has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient way of tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning algorithm that uses a small-scale partial PLM and progressively expands its depth and width until the full-model size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could save over 30% of training computations while achieving comparable performance. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal by using an explore-critic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker in real-world scenarios. |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated content use simple hashes of precedent tokens to partition vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-based watermark framework to enhance the robustness against paraphrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is robust under different paraphrases and the semantic meaning of the sentences will be likely preserved under paraphrase. |
From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing definitions of streaming LLMs are fragmented and lack a systematic taxonomy . large language models are pre-trained on static and full-context corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming Large Language Models and propose underlying methodologies for streaming LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. |
Beyond Cross-Modal Alignment: Measuring and Leveraging Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that vision-language models have modality gaps that persist even in well-aligned models. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-dominance score to measure and leverage modality gaps . they propose automatic interpretability metrics to evaluate these features in a scalable manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for training-free probing and editing methods for understanding model perception across genders and generating adversarial examples. |
Contrastive Prompting Enhances Sentence Embeddings in LLMs through Inference-Time Steering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on prompt engineering to encode the full semantics of a sentence into the embedding of the last token. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that introduces an extra auxiliary prompt to elicit better sentence embedding . they propose to use the hidden state of the token as the sentence embedded in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can improve performance of existing prompt-based methods on STS tasks and downstream classification tasks. |
Dual Complex Number Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods fail to model non-commutative composition patterns . extending to such sophisticated spaces increases the amount of parameters, which greatly reduces the parameter efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge graph embedding method that maps entities to the dual complex number space and represents relations as rotations in 2D space via dual complex multiplication. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that the proposed method improves link prediction and path query answering. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels. |
PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Mohammad Kachuee, Teja Gollapudi, Minseok Kim, Yin Huang, Kai Sun, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Nirav Shah, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matching (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the majority of 8B competitors on three benchmarks. |
ReSo: A Reward-driven Self-organizing LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Reasoning Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) are limited by poor flexibility and scalability, with underdeveloped optimization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a task graph generation and a reward-driven two-stage agent selection process to integrate multi-agent systems to improve their reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on Math-MAS and SciBench-MAS SciBech, while other methods completely fail. |
Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent literature reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-detection method to detect which questions an LLM does not know by combining the two components to identify whether the model generates a non-factual response to the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect which questions an LLM does not know across factoid question-answering, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Contrastive Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current LLMs exhibit limited robustness to unseen instructions, generating inconsistent outputs when the same instruction is phrased with slightly varied forms or language styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which maximizes the similarity between the hidden representations of semantically equivalent instruction-instance pairs while minimizing the similarities between semantically different ones. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the PromptBench benchmark show that Contrastive Instruction Tuning improves LLMs’ robustness to unseen instructions with variations across character, word, sentence, and semantic levels by +2.5% in accuracy. |
R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Li, Qi Luo, Xiaonan Li, Bufan Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Yuxin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | RAG systems that integrate external knowledge with Large Language Models often become bottlenecks due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers. |
Uplift-RAG: Uplift-Driven Knowledge Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to estimate document utility rely on downstream generation performance, which conflates the influence of external documents with the intrinsic knowledge of the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose an uplift-based definition of document utility that quantifies each document’s marginal benefit over the LLM’s internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of the LLM by incorporating external retrieved documents into the model. |
Extending Complex Logical Queries on Uncertain Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on logical queries on knowledge graphs overlook the incompleteness of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose an ML-based approach to answer soft queries on uncertain knowledge . they propose to use forward inference and backward calibration to avoid catastrophic errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures there are no catastrophic cascading errors while maintaining the same complexity as state-of-the-art inference algorithms for first-order queries. |
Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for explainable machine learning systems focus on interpreting outputs or connections between inputs and outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative explanation framework that learns to make classification decisions and generates fine-grained explanations at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses all baselines on two datasets and generates concise explanations at the same time. |
Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Question Answering via Prompt-Assisted Self-learning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing SFDA methods focus on the adaptation phase, overlooking the impact of source domain training on model generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a source-free domain adaptation approach for Question Answering where a model trained on a domain is adapted to unlabeled target domains without additional source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in managing domain gaps and demonstrating greater stability across target domains. |
ICDAGENT: Empowering Agentic Large Language Models for Explainable Medical Coding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models lack convincing, human-understandable explanations, making them difficult for physicians to trust and use in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to automatically assign ICD codes to clinical notes while providing explicit justifications for each assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves effective ICD coding with accurate explanations using two collaborative LLM agents: a coding agent and a critical agent. |
m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Yang, Hongcheng Guo, Yuwei Yin, Jiaqi Bai, Bing Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinnian Liang, LinZheng Chai, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal neural machine translation models focus on bilingual translation, but experimental results show that they outperform the text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P) this framework aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
Multimodal Instruction Tuning with Conditional Mixture of LoRA (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in diverse tasks across different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal instruction tuning with Conditional Mixture-of-LoRA. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MixLoRA outperforms LoRA with the same or higher ranks . MLLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in diverse tasks across domains . |
Navigating the Dual Facets: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Sequential Memory Editing in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihao Lin, Mohammad Beigi, Hongxuan Li, Yufan Zhou, Yuxiang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Wenpeng Yin, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Memory Editing (ME) has emerged as an efficient method to modify erroneous facts or inject new knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs with single edit only and parameter-modifying ME with parameter-preserving ME. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain LLMs’ fundamental capabilities but struggles to accurately recall edited knowledge presented in a different format. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ke Lin, Jiahao Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Wentao Zhang, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most. |
KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent legislation of the "right to be forgotten" has led to the interest in machine unlearning . MU can be used to forget specific training instances as if they have never existed . |
| Approach: | They propose a general unlearning framework called KGA to induce forgetfulness . they propose several unlearning evaluation metrics with pertinence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on large-scale datasets and provides insight into unlearning for NLP tasks. |
DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guangming Qin, Yuhao Deng, Yukun Zhao, Zhenyang Li, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang, Yizhou Yan, Chengliang Chai, Lei Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Entity-Centric Multimodal Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiulong Wu, Zhengliang Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference alignment methods focus on aligning model responses with human preferences while neglecting image-text modality alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose Entity-centric Multimodal Preference Optimization to improve modality alignment . they use open-source instruction datasets to automatically construct high-quality preference data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucination rates by 80.4% on Object HalBench and 52.6% on MM HalBech. |
When Helpers Become Hazards: A Benchmark for Analyzing Multimodal LLM-Powered Safety in Daily Life (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xinyue Lou, Xu Jinan, Jingyi Yin, Xiaolong Wang, Zhaolu Kang, null Liaoyouwei, Yixuan Wang, Xiangyu Shi, Fengran Mo, SU Yao, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Safety impact of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on human behavior is evaluated in this study. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-warning-based evaluation framework that encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safety-warning-based evaluation framework encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals. |
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Chen, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Yujia Qin, Fengyu Wang, Zhi Wang, Xiao Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
Chinese Morpheme-informed Evaluation of Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models focused on the perspective of various tasks or abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate large language models from a linguistic perspective and use morpheme to measure morphology and syntax. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ChatGPT in Chinese scenarios with a morpheme-informed benchmark and human exam questions. |
DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue quality assessment are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset . open-domain dialogue assessment is complicated and costly, but it can be done by recruiting human evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is openly accessible at https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dialogue_quality_evaluation. |
Analytical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Wanjun Zhong, Siyuan Wang, Duyu Tang, Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Yining Chen, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models with implicit reasoning ability struggle to solve analytical reasoning of text. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to analyze text and use it to perform reasoning over it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms pre-trained models on an analysis of the Law School Admission Test dataset. |
Neural Deepfake Detection with Factual Structure of Text (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deepfake detection typically represent documents with coarse-grained representations, but they struggle to capture factual structures of documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based model that captures factual structures of documents for deepfake detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves strong base models built with RoBERTa on two public deepfake datasets. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact checking textual statements are not yet available. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network approach capable of leveraging logical operations for fact checking . they use a textual statement and semi-structured tables to generate a program from it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on TABFACT dataset . it derives a program (a.k.a. logical form) of the statement in semantic parsing manner . |
IAPT: Instance-Aware Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt tuning require many soft tokens to guarantee performance . large language models still require a large amount of GPU memory and computations to fine-tune . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a parameter-efficient soft prompt generator to generate idiosyncratic soft prompts for each input instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baselines with comparable tunable parameters and is more efficient than LoRA under the single-backbone multi-tenant setting. |
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art. |
SemPA: Improving Sentence Embeddings of Large Language Models through Semantic Preference Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing sentence embedding methods rely on fixed prompt templates or involve modifications to the model architecture, compromising its generative capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence-level direct preference optimization approach that boosts the sentence representations while preserving the generative ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves representations of semantically meaningful vectors without sacrificing generation capability. |
Tree-CoT-RT: An Explainable Multi-Path Tree-Guided Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Zhenke Duan, Xin Yin, Haichuan Hu, Hualong Chen, null Suyi, Congqing He, Yike Tan, Yu-N Cheah
| Challenge: | Existing methods lack explainability and generalization, making it difficult to justify inference decisions and detect implicit sentiment across domains and varied expression patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable multi-path tree-guided chain-of-thought framework specifically designed for ASQP. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmark datasets show that Tree-CoT-RT outperforms baselines. |
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inject safety-aligned large language models rely on token-level mappings, which do not guarantee sustained harmful output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly modifies model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. |
Unleashing Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via Textual Representation Guided Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models struggle with 3D spatial reasoning as they fail to construct structured abstractions of the 3D environment depicted in video inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompting method that induces MLLMs to generate 3D representations as reasoning traces for more accurate spatial question answering. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench and OST-Bech show that TRACE improves over prior prompting strategies across a diverse range of MLLM backbones. |
ManCC: A Task-Anchored Benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese Cross-Lingual Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Meiqi Wang, Xiaoxin Sun, Dongjie Wang, Ruixin Yu, Xiantao Heng, Shuo Wang, Zhen Huang, Peng Zhao, Suhua Wang, Minghao Yin
| Challenge: | Mainstream research in natural language processing has focused on high-resource and modern languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-anchored benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation . they use a parallel corpus of 16,627 sentence pairs to evaluate the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that linguistic differences influence performance and broader language coverage facilitate low-resource transfer. |
Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have produced significant advances in the field of recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve up-to-date structure information from the knowledge graph to augment recommendations by leveraging external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a large dataset show that the proposed method is effective in enhancing LLM-based recommendations. |
Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models’ Safety Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output is a common practice for existing LLMs, but it is vulnerable to inference-time jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to fill a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output and to detach safety mechanisms from the template region to mitigate the risk of inference-time jailbreak attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is widespread across aligned LLMs and shows that it mitigates inference-time jailbreak vulnerabilities. |
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users’ interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-adaptive supervised fine-tuning framework that generates proactive guidance for users to click for the next turn of the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement). |
Weights-Rotated Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenxu Yang, Ruipeng Jia, Mingyu Zheng, Naibin Gu, Zheng Lin, Siyuan Chen, Weichong Yin, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with high reward hacking are limited by the complexity of the parameter space and the complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a weights-rotated preference optimization algorithm that constrains the output layer logits with the KL divergence inherited from DPO and fine-tunes the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves a 3.27-point improvement on AlpacaEval 2 and surpasses the best baseline by 6.2 to 7.5 points on MT-Bench with merely 0.015% of the trainable parameters. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent models for zero pronoun resolution in Chinese are short-sighted and do not capture semantic information for zeros and candidate antecedents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a deep reinforcement learning approach to Chinese zero pronoun resolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in three experimental settings. |
Attribute-aware Sequence Network for Review Summarization (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing review summarization systems generate summary only based on review content and neglect the authors’ attributes (e.g., gender, age, and occupation). |
| Approach: | They propose an Attribute-aware Sequence Network (ASN) to take the aforementioned users’ characteristics into account by encoding their attributes over the words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on tripAtt and human evaluation by taking the authors' attributes into account and incorporating attribute embedding and word-using habits into word prediction. |
ToolGate: Contract-Grounded and Verified Tool Execution for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Jiannan Cao, Xinyi Wang, Songhang Deng, Jintao Chen, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for tool-augmented LLMs rely heavily on natural language reasoning to determine when tools can be invoked and whether their results should be trusted. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward execution framework that provides logical safety guarantees and verifiable state evolution for LLM tool calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the reliability and verifiability of tool-augmented LLM systems while maintaining competitive performance on multi-step reasoning tasks. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
UEGP: Unified Expert-Guided Pre-training for Knowledge Rekindle (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yutao Mou, Kexiang Wang, Jianhe Lin, Dehong Ma, Jun Fan, Daiting Shi, Zhicong Cheng, Gu Simiu, Dawei Yin, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for pre-training and fine-tuning have limitations . knowledge rekindle aims to break through performance upper bounds of experts without introducing additional annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for pre-training and fine-tuning that aims to re-incorporate the fine- tuned expert model into the training cycle and break through performance upper bounds of experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks through performance upper bounds of experts without additional annotated data. |
3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 3D visual grounding aims to localize the desired objects in a 3D point cloud by a free-form language description. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware framework which captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks . it captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes . |
Permutative Preference Alignment from Listwise Ranking of Human Judgments (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align Large Language Models with human preferences are based on the Bradley-Terry model, but when multiple responses are available, the B-T model fails to guarantee an accurate list ranking of the responses. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline listwise approach that incorporates the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) as an alternative training objective for LLM alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing pairwise and listwise methods on evaluation sets and general benchmarks such as AlpacaEval. |
Mixed Distillation Helps Smaller Language Models Reason Better (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multiple step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recent NLP reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed distillation framework that distills multiple step-by-step reasoning abilities into smaller language models (SLMs) they leverage LLMs to generate multiple step by step reasoning rationales by sampling automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on SVAMP, GSM8K and ASDIV, while a single model generated by MD exceeds the comprehensive performance of two individual CoT and PoT distilled models. |
LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiongnan Liu, Yutao Zhu, Shuting Wang, Xiaochi Wei, Erxue Min, Yu Lu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM model that embeds a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches. |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
LEDOM: Reverse Language Model (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xunjian Yin, Sitao Cheng, Yuxi Xie, Xinyu Hu, Li Lin, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Xiaojun Wan
| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right, yet they are limited in their ability to factorize text. |
| Approach: | They propose a purely reverse autoregressive language model that factorizes text as a product of left-to-right conditionals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to score forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
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. |
KnowTuning: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yougang Lyu, Lingyong Yan, Shuaiqiang Wang, Haibo Shi, Dawei Yin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Maarten Rijke, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a default solution for many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware fine-tuning method to improve LLMs' knowledge awareness . they propose augmentation and comparison stages to improve accuracy and reliability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more facts with less factual error rate under fine-grained facts evaluation. |
AEA: Adaptive Expert Allocation Improves Sentence Embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts LLM (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts models allocate a fixed number of experts uniformly across all layers and tokens, ignoring inter-layer and inter-token heterogeneity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Expert Allocation framework that performs layer-wise and token-wise expert allocation to enhance embedding quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding quality across multiple MoE models. |
Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialogues (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Jianing Yin, Yongkang Huang, Yihan Shi, Xikun Zhang, Libiao Peng, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Zhipeng Hu, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cognitive restructuring (CR) are limited by entrenched cognitive distortions, emotional resistance, and individual differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that structures CR as theory-grounded multi-stage multi-turn dialogue and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates supportive strategies for emotional management and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
Mutual Reinforcement of LLM Dialogue Synthesis and Summarization Capabilities for Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yen-Ju Lu, Ting-Yao Hu, Hema Swetha Koppula, Hadi Pouransari, Jen-Hao Rick Chang, Yin Xia, Xiang Kong, Qi Zhu, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Oncel Tuzel, Raviteja Vemulapalli
| Challenge: | Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within large language models to enhance few-shot dialogue summarization task. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. |
Deeper Insights Without Updates: The Power of In-Context Learning Over Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Fine-tuning and in-context learning are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a circuit shift theory to explain why in-context learning is superior to fine-tuning for tasks with implicit patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can grasp deep patterns and significantly improve accuracy on implicit patterns, compared with fine-tuning and in-context learning. |
Learning to Synthesize Data for Semantic Parsing (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for synthesizing data for semantic parsing require handcrafted rules to synthesize new programs or utterance-program pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a (non-neural) PCFG to model the composition of programs and a BART-based translation model to map a program to an utterance to learn a generative model from existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be efficiently learned from existing data on benchmarks of GeoQuery and Spider. |
Meta Distant Transfer Learning for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Notable PLMs are available for text classification tasks, but performance of PLM on downstream tasks may be limited by the availability of training set. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework to learn the transferable knowledge across tasks using PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on seven datasets and is task-agnostic and unbiased. |
Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
GOVERN: Gradient Orientation Vote Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Reinforced Distillation (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance in OpenQA, but for practical deployment, knowledge distillation is crucial to maintain high performance while operating under computational constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to perform unsupervised knowledge distillation without the guidance of labels to achieve 99.5% of performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 99.5% of performance in a commercial question-answering system. |
TRACE: An Experiential Framework for Coherent Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multihop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) treat each reasoning step independently and fail to leverage experience from prior explorations, leading to fragmented reasoning and redundant exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies LLM-driven contextual reasoning with exploration prior integration to enhance coherence and robustness of multihop KGQA. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on multiple KGQA benchmarks show that TRACE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments sparse-attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| 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. |
Pre-training CLIP against Data Poisoning with Optimal Transport-based Matching and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. |
| Approach: | They propose an Optimal Transport-based framework to reconstruct image-caption pairs and propose an optimal transport-based distance measure to re-assign new captions based on the proposed optimal transport distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the attack success rates of poisoning attacks to 0% in most cases. |
Hierarchical Pretraining on Multimodal Electronic Health Records (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pretraining models on EHR data are too specific, limiting their transferability. |
| Approach: | They propose a general, unified pretraining framework for hierarchically multimodal EHR data that can be used to train models on a large dataset before fine-tuning it on 'upstream' tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on eight downstream tasks spanning three levels and compares with baselines on 18 different tasks. |
Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Pre-trained Language Models to downstream tasks are limited by their inference APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prompting decoding framework that query PLMs with multiple prompts . they propose to query Plms with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting. |
On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Language Models with Early-Stage Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Huaisheng Zhu, MingYu Liu, Junze Liu, Zhen Ge, Tian Wang, Jiri Gesi, Dakuo Wang, Weiqi Zhang, Houyu Zhang, Yufan Guo, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Sujay Sanghavi
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that masked diffusion models (MDMs) can surpass autoregressive models (ARMs) in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate early token predictions without demonstration data by distilling an unnormalized target distribution into the original model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math, planning, and RLHF tasks show that COPSD improves both effectiveness and efficiency, and further enhances performance when combined with supervised fine-tuning. |
SecCoder: Towards Generalizable and Robust Secure Code Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing secure code generation methods have limited generalizability to unseen test cases and poor robustness against the attacked model, leading to safety failures in code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable and robust secure code generation method SecCoder by using in-context learning and the safe demonstration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant security improvement of 7.20% on unseen test cases and better robustness against the attacked model. |
Beyond End-to-End VLMs: Leveraging Intermediate Text Representations for Superior Flowchart Understanding (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Flowcharts are typically presented as images, driving the trend of using vision-language models for end-to-end flowchart understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model (VLM) that generates textual representations from flowchart images and a textual Reasoner that performs question-answering based on the text representations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the FlowVQA and FlowLearn benchmarks demonstrate TextFlow’s state-of-the-art performance as well as its robustness. |
Improving Speech Translation by Fusing Speech and Text (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In speech translation, multimodal data to address limitations of individual modalities has shown significant effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal model which supports three input modalities for speech, text and fused speech-text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average of 34.0 BLEU on MuST-C, GigaST and newstest benchmark. |
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qiming Peng, Yinxu Pan, Wenjin Wang, Bin Luo, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhengjie Huang, Yuhui Cao, Weichong Yin, Yongfeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Shikun Feng, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visually rich document understanding lack layout-centered knowledge . experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout improves layout awareness . |
| Approach: | They propose a document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on key downstream tasks. |
Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baselines in 99% of all settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sliding window technique to pack data before continual pre-training to preserve contextual information and enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method outperforming baselines in 99% of settings. |
Aggregation of Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Enhancing Answer Selection in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhangyue Yin, Qiushi Sun, Qipeng Guo, Zhiyuan Zeng, Xiaonan Li, Tianxiang Sun, Cheng Chang, Qinyuan Cheng, Ding Wang, Xiaofeng Mou, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought prompting have facilitated significant breakthroughs for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reasoning aggregation framework to address this problem . they propose dynamic sampling to adjust the number of reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble methods on complex reasoning tasks. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
PIArena: A Platform for Prompt Injection Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | OWASP identifies prompt injection as the top-1 security risk for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified platform for prompt injection evaluation that integrates state-of-the-art attacks and defenses into a platform. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack exploits state-of-the-art defenses and generalizes them on diverse datasets and attacks. |
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel tool invocation framework that decomposes tasks into parallel tool-using subtasks while aggregating results for subsequent decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. |
PoD: Positional Dependency-Based Word Embedding for Aspect Term Extraction (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings that capture the contextual information only produce moderate results in aspect term extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a positional dependency-based word embedding which takes both dependency context and positional context into account for aspect term extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other embedding methods in aspect term extraction. |
ContextCheck: Sentence-Level Faithfulness Verification with Context-Aware Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yueqin Yin, Yaxi Li, Xin Liu, Xun Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Simin Ma, Shujian Liu, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Pengcheng He, Mingyuan Zhou, Song Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models often hallucinate, producing content that is factually incorrect or not grounded in the sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for sentence-level faithfulness verification with context-aware disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Macro F1 by over 10 points compared to baselines on three context-dependent datasets. |
VisLingInstruct: Elevating Zero-Shot Learning in Multi-Modal Language Models with Autonomous Instruction Optimization (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Dongsheng Zhu, Daniel Tang, Weidong Han, Jinghui Lu, Yukun Zhao, Guoliang Xing, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Current MMLMs show impressive zero-shot abilities in multi-modal tasks, but their performance depends heavily on the quality of instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to advancing multi-modal language models in zero-shot learning by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts through In-Context Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot performance in multi-modal tasks by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts. |
Confusion is the Final Barrier: Rethinking Jailbreak Evaluation and Investigating the Real Misuse Threat of LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Yan, Sheng Sun, Zhe Wang, Yijun Lin, Zenghao Duan, Zhifei Zheng, Min Liu, Zhiyi Yin, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have been developed to deal with real-world crimes, but it remains unclear whether they internalize authentic knowledge or are forced to simulate toxic language patterns. |
| Approach: | They construct knowledge-intensive Q&A to investigate misuse threats of Large Language Models in terms of dangerous knowledge possession, harmful task planning utility, and harmfulness judgment robustness. |
| Outcome: | The findings raise concerns that jailbreak success is often attributable to a hallucination loop between jailbroken LLM and judger LLM . |
AdapThink: Adaptive Thinking Preferences for Reasoning Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has highlighted a significant inefficiency associated with the slow thinking paradigm . models often overthink simple tasks while underthinking complex challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adaptive reasoning preference control that dynamically adjusts reflection preferences based on group-level distributional statistics of reasoning length and reflection intensity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces average response length by 17.1%-21.4% while improving performance by 6.12-6.59 points under 32K token budgets. |