Papers by Ying Yang

Progra: Progress-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Function Calling (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	ProUIE improves universal information extraction (UIE) without external information . many LLM-based methods rely on extra schema cues, external resources or complex alignment and verification pipelines .
Approach:	They propose a Macro-to-Micro progressive learning approach that improves UIE without external information.
Outcome:	ProUIE outperforms instruction-tuned baselines on average for NER and RE while using a smaller backbone.

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Huacan Chai, Zijie Cao, Maolin Ran, Yingxuan Yang, Jianghao Lin, Xin Peng, Hairui Wang, Renjie Ding, Ziyu Wan, Muning Wen, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Fei Huang, Ying Wen

Challenge:	Existing methods for multi-turn function calling are limited by redundancy and lack explicit integration of progress awareness into training.
Approach:	They propose a framework that explicitly integrates progress awareness into LLM training for multi-turn function calling.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that Progra outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks.

LightSeq: A High Performance Inference Library for Transformers (2021.naacl-industry)

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Xiaohui Wang, Ying Xiong, Yang Wei, Mingxuan Wang, Lei Li

Language Models

Challenge:	Existing inference frameworks for natural language processing are not the best choice for online service of sequence processing problems.
Approach:	They propose a highly efficient inference library for Transformer models that includes GPU optimization techniques to streamline computation and reduce memory footprint.
Outcome:	The proposed library achieves 14x speedup compared with TensorFlow and 1.4x speed up compared to a concurrent CUDA implementation.

OCP: Outlier-Centric Probing for Dynamic Structured Pruning of LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Yang Ji, Ying Sun

Innovative Image Fraud Detection with Cross-Sample Anomaly Analysis: The Power of LLMs (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing structured pruning methods fail to identify outlier-triggering tokens and uniform layer-wise sparsity misaligns with heterogeneous outlier distributions.
Approach:	They propose a framework that prioritizes capturing outlier-triggering tokens rather than reconstructing full hidden distributions.
Outcome:	Experiments on LLaMA2, LLama3 and OPT show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves 25% perplexity reduction at 1.6 speedup.

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QiWen Wang, Junqi Yang, Zhenghao Lin, Zhenzhe Ying, Weiqiang Wang, Chen Lin

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for document image fraud detection lack visual clues on tampered regions.
Approach:	They propose a framework for detecting logical inconsistencies in document images by leveraging LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art fraud detection methods by 79.6% on CrossCred and industrial solutions by 21.7% on business data.

LearnAlign: Data Selection for LLM Reinforcement Learning with Improved Gradient Alignment (2026.findings-acl)

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Shipeng Li, Zhiqin Yang, Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Dong Fang, Ying Tai, Zhe Peng

Language Models

Challenge:	Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a key technique for enhancing LLMs’ reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck.
Approach:	They propose a gradient-alignment-based method which intelligently selects the learnable and representative training reasoning data for RLVR post-training.
Outcome:	Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly reduces training data requirements while improving performance.

An Iteratively Parallel Generation Method with the Pre-Filling Strategy for Document-level Event Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Guanhua Huang, Runxin Xu, Ying Zeng, Jiaze Chen, Zhouwang Yang, Weinan E

Title2Event: Benchmarking Open Event Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese Title Dataset (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to generate event roles require a given generation order . parallel methods suffer from inadequate training and manifest zero accuracies on some event roles.
Approach:	They propose an iteratively parallel generation method with the Pre-Filling strategy to generate event roles in parallel to avoid order selection.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms other entity-enhanced models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets.

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Haolin Deng, Yanan Zhang, Yangfan Zhang, Wangyang Ying, Changlong Yu, Jun Gao, Wei Wang, Xiaoling Bai, Nan Yang, Jin Ma, Xiang Chen, Tianhua Zhou

DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing EE datasets define fixed event types and design specific schemas for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text.
Approach:	They propose to use a sentence-level dataset to benchmark Open Event Extraction without restricting event types.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages.

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Dawei Li, Shu Yang, Zhen Tan, Jae Baik, Sukwon Yun, Joseph Lee, Aaron Chacko, Bojian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Ying Ding, Huan Liu, Li Shen, Tianlong Chen

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains.
Approach:	They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs.

Improving Knowledge Graph Embedding Using Affine Transformations of Entities Corresponding to Each Relation (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Jinfa Yang, Yongjie Shi, Xin Tong, Robin Wang, Taiyan Chen, Xianghua Ying

EET: Experience-Driven Early Termination for Cost-Efficient Software Engineering Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge graph embedding methods use k-dimensional vectors to represent each entity in a knowledge graph.
Approach:	They propose to use affine transformations to embed knowledge graphs using previous methods . they propose to add k additional variables to the existing methods to perform embedding .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms RotatE, Distmult and ComplEx on various data sets.

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Yaoqi Guo, Ying Xiao, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yiling Lou, Yang Liu, Zhenpeng Chen

Amalgamating Knowledge from Two Teachers for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Adversarial Training (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large language models are reshaping modern software development, but they often incur substantial monetary cost.
Approach:	They propose an experience-driven early termination approach that extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection.
Outcome:	The proposed approach reduces cost by 19%–55% with negligible loss in resolution rate (at most 0.2%) EET extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection.

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Wanwei He, Min Yang, Rui Yan, Chengming Li, Ying Shen, Ruifeng Xu

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue systems require a large number of handcrafted features and labels.
Approach:	They propose a "Two-Teacher One-Student" learning framework for task-oriented dialogue . the framework amalgamates knowledge from two teacher networks and provides guidance .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on two benchmark datasets . it can retrieve accurate KB entities and generate human-like responses simultaneously .

Improving Alignment in LVLMs with Debiased Self-Judgment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Sihan Yang, Chenhang Cui, Zihao Zhao, Yiyang Zhou, Weilong Yan, Ying Wei, Huaxiu Yao

Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for aligning LVLMs rely on external datasets, human annotations or complex post-processing.
Approach:	They propose a method that generates a debiased self-judgment score for LVLMs . this self-evaluation metric is created internally by the model without external resources .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in reducing hallucinations and safety concerns.

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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer

Question Answering

Challenge:	Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements.
Approach:	They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations.

Language Scaling for Universal Suggested Replies Model (2021.naacl-industry)

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Qianlan Ying, Payal Bajaj, Budhaditya Deb, Yu Yang, Wei Wang, Bojia Lin, Milad Shokouhi, Xia Song, Yang Yang, Daxin Jiang

Multilinguality

Challenge:	We consider scaling automated suggested replies (SR) to multiple languages for a commercial email application.
Approach:	They propose a multi-lingual multi-task continual learning framework with auxiliary tasks and language adapters to train universal language representation across regions.
Outcome:	The proposed model reduces catastrophic forgetting and improves cross-lingual transfer across languages while reducing training costs.

Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback (2026.findings-acl)

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Yiyuan Yang, Zichuan Liu, Lei Song, Kai Ying, Stephen Wang, Joshua Thomas Bamford, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Jiang Bian, Qingsong Wen

C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making.
Approach:	They propose a time-series reasoning task that reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed task reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm.

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Ying Mo, Jiahao Liu, Jian Yang, Qifan Wang, Shun Zhang, Jingang Wang, Zhoujun Li

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for in-context learning with large language models focus on using correct or negative examples, ignoring the potential value of incorrect or negative samples.
Approach:	They propose a few-shot technique that leverages both correct and incorrect sample constructions to create in-context learning demonstrations.
Outcome:	The proposed technique outperforms previous few-shot in-context learning methods on a broad spectrum of related tasks.

Knowledge Graph Embedding by Adaptive Limit Scoring Loss Using Dynamic Weighting Strategy (2022.findings-acl)

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Jinfa Yang, Xianghua Ying, Yongjie Shi, Xin Tong, Ruibin Wang, Taiyan Chen, Bowei Xing

Learning to Think on Hypergraph: HyperCoT for Structure-Guided N-ary Knowledge Graph Completion (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge graph embedding models use a loss framework to distinguish between correct and incorrect triplets.
Approach:	They propose a loss framework that reweights each triplet to highlight the less-optimized triplets.
Outcome:	The proposed method performs on several knowledge graph embedding models, including TransE, TransH and ComplEx.

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Mengxue Yang, Jinming Li, Chun Yang, Jiaqi Zhu, Jiafan Li, Guanhua Zhang, Ying Li

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods to solve knowledge hypergraph link prediction problem are limited by their ability to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) representations.
Approach:	They propose a structure-aware approach that models multi-hop structural reasoning as a depth-sensitive progressive evidence accumulation process.
Outcome:	Experiments on three real-world datasets show that HyperCoT outperforms strong n-ary KGC baselines while yielding interpretable multi-hop reasoning traces.

Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains (2026.findings-acl)

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Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, but their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined.
Approach:	They propose a moral alignment benchmark to test the safety of large language models . they find that models struggle with traits directly antithetical to safety principles .
Outcome:	The proposed model fails to accurately portray morally ambiguous or villainous characters . the model fails most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles .

Uncovering Strategic Egoism Behaviors in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Yaoyuan Zhang, Zonghao Ying, Aishan Liu, Jian Yang, Tianlin Li, Yaodong Yang, Xianglong Liu

Language Models

Challenge:	Extensive experiments on 9 proprietary LLMs reveal that SE behaviors are widespread . study identifies egoistic decision-making as a risk for large language models .
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to measure egoistic behavior in large language models . they propose toxicity, jailbreak vulnerability and a lightweight mitigation that reinforces situational constraints .
Outcome:	The proposed model has a 67.96% occurrence rate and frequently manifests as manipulative coercion.

Model-Based Imaginative Planning for Embodied Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Junru Song, Hengzhe Jin, Yucong Huang, Tingsong Jiang, Weien Zhou, Feifei Wang, Yang Yang, Ying Wen, Wen Yao

WebUncertainty: Dual-Level Uncertainty Driven Planning and Reasoning For Autonomous Web Agent (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	a lightweight world model converts raw pixels into object-centric symbolic states amenable to language-based reasoning . IMPLEMENT is a framework for grounding language agents in visual embodied environments .
Approach:	They propose a model-based reasoning framework that enables frozen large language models to perform imaginative planning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be used to ground language agents in visual embodied environments.

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Lingfeng Zhang, Yongan Sun, Jinpeng Hu, Hui Ma, Ying Yang, Kuien Liu, Zenglin Shi, Meng Wang

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing web agents struggle with complex tasks due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a task-uncertainty-driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments.
Outcome:	The proposed framework performs better on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks than existing frameworks.

Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking (2021.acl-short)

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Binzong Geng, Fajie Yuan, Qiancheng Xu, Ying Shen, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing methods to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems are lacking.
Approach:	They propose a continual learning method which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed method preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks.

Modeling Consistency Preference via Lexical Chains for Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)

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Xinglin Lyu, Junhui Li, Shimin Tao, Hao Yang, Ying Qin, Min Zhang

Machine Translation

Challenge:	Experimental results show that consistency preference for lexical chains reduces lexical translation inconsistency . Lexical translation consistency is a common discourse phenomenon .
Approach:	They propose a consistency-aware model which captures consistency context . they then define consistency-tailored latent variables which guide translation of corresponding sentences .
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves translation performance in ChineseEnglish and FrenchEnglish translation tasks.

DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs (2026.acl-long)

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Wenzhuo Xu, Zhipeng Wei, Zonghao Ying, Deyue Zhang, Dongdong Yang, Xiangzheng Zhang, Quanchen Zou

Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)

Challenge:	Existing jailbreak methods only use a single image, restricting the attack space . Existing frameworks only use single image to distribute harmful requests across multiple images .
Approach:	They propose a compositional jailbreak framework that leverages Distributed instruction, Multimodal evidence and a Number chain task to fully enhance the jailbreak performance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of over 90% on GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4 .

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Yang Deng, Ying Shen, Min Yang, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Kai Lei

Question Answering

Challenge:	Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data.
Approach:	They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection.

Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Qiao Liang, Yuke Zhu, Chao Ge, Lei Yang, Ying Shen, Bo Zheng, Sheng Guo

Reasoning

Challenge:	Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment.
Approach:	They propose a tool-integrated reasoning approach that localizes the first irrecoverable step and leverages it for fine-grained credit assignment.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm outperforms strong Agentic RL benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency.

EARA: Improving Biomedical Semantic Textual Similarity with Entity-Aligned Attention and Retrieval Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Ying Xiong, Xin Yang, Linjing Liu, Ka-Chun Wong, Qingcai Chen, Yang Xiang, Buzhou Tang

InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods to measure semantic similarity between biomedical texts are inefficient due to too many biomedically-related entities.
Approach:	They propose an entity-aligned, attention-based and retrieval-augmented PLM that aligns the same type of fine-grained entity information in each sentence pair with an entity alignment matrix with an auxiliary loss.
Outcome:	The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art on both in-domain and out-of domain datasets.

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Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Runing Yang, Zihao Lin, Qifan Wang, Ankith Mohan, Jianfeng He, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu, Lifu Huang

Aspect and Sentiment Aware Abstractive Review Summarization (C18-1)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, often producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs.
Outcome:	The framework outperforms existing methods in the hallucination detection benchmark HaluEval and the previous methods at the same time.

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Min Yang, Qiang Qu, Ying Shen, Qiao Liu, Wei Zhao, Jia Zhu

Summarization

Challenge:	Abstractive summarization is a task that generates short and concise summaries of user generated reviews.
Approach:	They propose an interactive attention mechanism to learn the representations of context and aspect words within reviews, acted as an encoder.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves impressive results compared to other strong competitors on a real-life dataset.

Learning Hierarchy-Aware Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Representing Relations as 3D Rotations (2022.coling-1)

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Jinfa Yang, Xianghua Ying, Yongjie Shi, Xin Tong, Ruibin Wang, Taiyan Chen, Bowei Xing

Chain-of-Exemplar: Enhancing Distractor Generation for Multimodal Educational Question Generation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge graph embedding models fail to model semantic hierarchies . Existing methods fail to understand the semantic hierarchies of knowledge graphs .
Approach:	They propose a model which embeds entities as pure quaternions and constrains the modulus of entities to make them have hierarchical distributions.
Outcome:	The proposed model can encode symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, composition, multiple relation patterns and learn semantic hierarchies simultaneously.

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Haohao Luo, Yang Deng, Ying Shen, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Text Generation

Challenge:	Existing methods for multiple choice questions focus on text inputs and lack visual information.
Approach:	They propose a framework to generate subject-specific educational questions with plausible distractors based on multimodal content.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves question generation and distractor generation over existing methods across subjects and educational levels.

Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)

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Kai Lei, Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Min Yang, Wei Fan, Ying Shen

Neighbors Are Not Strangers: Improving Non-Autoregressive Translation under Low-Frequency Lexical Constraints (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance.
Approach:	They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.

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Chun Zeng, Jiangjie Chen, Tianyi Zhuang, Rui Xu, Hao Yang, Qin Ying, Shimin Tao, Yanghua Xiao

Machine Translation

Challenge:	Existing approaches to lexically constrained neural machine translation suffer from high latency.
Approach:	They propose a plug-in algorithm for non-autoregressive translation for this problem . they propose ACT to familiarize the model with the source-side context of constraints .
Outcome:	The proposed model improves over the backbone constrained NAT model in constraint preservation and translation quality, especially for rare constraints.

XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou

Multilinguality

Challenge:	XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios .
Approach:	They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks.

Diverse and Informative Dialogue Generation with Context-Specific Commonsense Knowledge Awareness (2020.acl-main)

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Sixing Wu, Ying Li, Dawei Zhang, Yang Zhou, Zhonghai Wu

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Generative dialogue systems tend to produce generic and boring responses, causing boring conversations . a novel commonsense knowledge-aware dialogue generation model is proposed to solve this problem .
Approach:	They propose to retrieve and introduce knowledge facts from knowledge graphs to reduce boring conversations . they use a Felicitous Fact mechanism to help the model focus on context-relevant knowledge facts .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in most experiments.

Unifying Text, Tables, and Images for Multimodal Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Haohao Luo, Ying Shen, Yang Deng

Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to multimodal question answering rely on single-modal or bi-modal models, which limit their ability to integrate information across all modalities.
Approach:	They propose a framework that unifies three different input modalities into a text-to-text format by employing position-enhanced table linearization and diversified image captioning techniques.
Outcome:	The proposed framework unifies three input modalities into a text-to-text format using position-enhanced table linearization and diversified image captioning techniques.

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Zheng Li, Xin Li, Ying Wei, Lidong Bing, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data.
Approach:	They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space .
Outcome:	The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation.

SLiNT: Structure-aware Language Model with Injection and Contrastive Training for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Mengxue Yang, Chun Yang, Jiaqi Zhu, Jiafan Li, Jingqi Zhang, Yuyang Li, Ying Li

SeedBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Seed Science (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) lack structural information and semantic context to infer missing entities . large language models often lack structural signals to infuse missing entities into knowledge graphs .
Approach:	a modular framework integrates structural information and semantic context into a frozen LLM backbone for link prediction.
Outcome:	a new framework integrates KG-derived structural information and semantic context to infer missing entities.

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Jie Ying, Zihong Chen, Zhefan Wang, Wanli Jiang, Chenyang Wang, Zhonghang Yuan, Haoyang Su, Huanjun Kong, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong

Towards Real-world Scenario: Imbalanced New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, but its application in seed science remains limited due to a shortage of experts and limited availability of online resources.
Approach:	They evaluate 26 leading large language models and compare them against a set of benchmarks . they find that there is a gap between the power of LLMs and real-world seed science problems .
Outcome:	The new seed benchmark highlights the gap between the power of large language models and real-world seed science problems.

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Shun Zhang, Yan Chaoran, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Ying Mo, Jiaqi Bai, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li

Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on detecting known and previously undefined categories of user intent . skewed and long-tailed distributions often encountered in open-world scenarios .
Approach:	They propose to use imbalanced new intent discovery task to identify familiar and novel intent categories within long-tailed distributions.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the existing benchmark on three datasets to simulate the real-world long-tail distributions.

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Yang Li, Cheng Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hua Jiang, Fanglei Sun, Weiqin Zu, Ying Wen, Yang Yang, Jun Wang

WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that the proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins.
Approach:	They propose a cross-utterance conditional VAE to estimate posterior probability distribution of latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features from past and future sentences.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins.

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Chenxu Liu, Yingjie Fu, Wei Yang, Ying Zhang, Tao Xie

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	Web applications (web apps) are a key arena for large language models to demonstrate their code generation capabilities and commercial potential.
Approach:	a new benchmark for large language models (LLMs) is designed to provide real-world user requirements and generalizable evaluation metrics.
Outcome:	a new benchmark for large language models (LLMs) provides a real-world, generalizable, and interpretable evaluation score . the benchmark measures user requirements, expression styles and human-preference-aligned weights . a web application can be used to demonstrate its commercial potential, authors say .

APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian

CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	APEX optimizes for text-to-image generation by combining learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need.
Approach:	They propose an algorithm that stabilizes heterogeneous rewards and dynamically schedules objectives . they propose a method that achieves better Pareto trade-offs across four heterogenous objectives based on P3 Adaptive Priorities .
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm achieves better pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy.

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Zhen Yang, Wei Du, Jie Wang, Wenze Zhou, Xiangfeng Meng, Zhengyang Wang, Suping Sun, Ziwei Du, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Yongbin Liu, Shicheng Tan, Jiahao Ying, Shu Zhao

More is Better: Enhancing Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Multi-Source Heterogeneous Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions.

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Sixing Wu, Ying Li, Minghui Wang, Dawei Zhang, Yang Zhou, Zhonghai Wu

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing knowledge-enhanced methods use a single-source homogeneous knowledge base with limited knowledge coverage.
Approach:	They propose a multi-source heterogeneous knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation model that leverages multiple knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing knowledge-enhanced models on a Chinese dataset and shows that it can leverage multiple heterogeneous knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage.

Neural-DINF: A Neural Network based Framework for Measuring Document Influence (2020.acl-main)

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Jie Tan, Changlin Yang, Ying Li, Siliang Tang, Chen Huang, Yueting Zhuang

Challenge:	Existing methods to measure scholarly impact of documents without citations only consider word frequency change.
Approach:	They propose a neural network framework that measures document influence without citations by using word frequency changes and word semantic shifts.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on document influence evaluation without citations.

EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)

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Wei Tang, Yixin Cao, Yang Deng, Jiahao Ying, Bo Wang, Yizhe Yang, Yuyue Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yong Liao

Challenge:	Existing knowledge evolution benchmarks are static and fail to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge.
Approach:	They propose an evolving dataset that categorizes information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is auto-updatable and enables evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs.

Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning Across Heterogeneous Languages (2020.emnlp-main)

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Zheng Li, Mukul Kumar, William Headden, Bing Yin, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang

From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing mPLM-based methods focus on designing costly model pre-training while ignoring equally crucial downstream adaptation.
Approach:	They propose a meta graph learning method that extracts meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences to learn to cross-lingual transfer.
Outcome:	The proposed method can learn to cross-lingual transfer by extracting meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences (tasks) it can also capture intrinsic language relationships to explicitly guide cross-linguistic transfer.

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Beining Wu, Fuyou Mao, Jiong Lin, Cheng Yang, Jiaxuan Lu, Yifu Guo, Siyu Zhang, Yifan Wu, Ying Huang, Fu Li

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

Browsing Like Human: A Multimodal Web Agent with Experiential Fast-and-Slow Thinking (2025.acl-long)

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Haohao Luo, Jiayi Kuang, Wei Liu, Ying Shen, Jian Luan, Yang Deng