Papers by Yong Li
Towards Reward Fairness in RLHF: From a Resource Allocation Perspective (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | if rewards are imperfect, they can adversely affect the alignment of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a bias-agnostic method to address the issue of reward unfairness from a resource allocation perspective without specifically designing for each type of bias . they apply methods Fairness Regularization and Fairness Coefficient to achieve fairness in rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fairness in rewards while minimizing biases . it can be applied to verification and reinforcement learning scenarios . |
POSITION BIAS MITIGATES POSITION BIAS: Mitigate Position Bias Through Inter-Position Knowledge Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Positional bias (PB) manifests as non-uniform sensitivity across contextual locations . previous studies have addressed PB by modifying the underlying architectures or employing extensive contextual awareness training. |
| Approach: | They propose a position-to-position knowledge distillation framework that leverages position-induced disparities to counteract PB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces positional bias and improves performance on retrieval and reasoning tasks. |
RealTalk-CN: A Realistic Chinese Speech Task-Oriented Dialogue Benchmark with Cross-Modal Analysis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in speech large language models have enabled end-to-end spoken interactions, but their robustness in real-world applications remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn, multi-domain speech–text TOD dataset for Chinese users . it contains 5.4k dialogues with annotations for dialogue states, disfluency types, speaker characteristics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate speech large language models in real-world scenarios . the proposed model is based on 5.4k real human-to-human dialogues with annotations . |
OOP: Object-Oriented Programming Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | None Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as a key tool for automated programming. |
| Approach: | They compare performance of None Large language models with language understanding models on functional programming and object-oriented programming benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The models perform relatively well on functional programming (FP) and object-oriented programming (OOP) benchmarks, while exhibiting poor performance on OOP benchmarks. |
Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we propose to extend the recently introduced model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the recently introduced meta-learning algorithm for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) they frame low-Resource translation as a meta- learning problem where we learn to adapt to low-REsource languages based on multilingual high-resourced language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta-learning algorithm outperforms the multilingual, transfer learning based approach and can train a competitive NMT system with only a fraction of training examples. |
DisCo_Speech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec (2026.acl-long)
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Tao Li, Wenshuo Ge, Zhichao Wang, Zihao Cui, Yong Ma, Yingying Gao, Chao Deng, Shilei Zhang, Junlan Feng
| Challenge: | DisCo-Speech is a zero-shot controllable text-to-speech framework . standard codecs entangle timbre and prosody, which hinders independent control in continuation-based LMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangled speech codec and an LM-based generator to solve this problem . they propose fusion and reconstruction that merges content and prosody into unified tokens . |
| Outcome: | DisCo-Speech achieves competitive voice cloning and superior zero-shot prosody control. |
Complex Evolutional Pattern Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2022.acl-short)
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Zixuan Li, Saiping Guan, Xiaolong Jin, Weihua Peng, Yajuan Lyu, Yong Zhu, Long Bai, Wei Li, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for TKG reasoning focus on modeling fact sequences of a fixed length, which cannot discover complex evolutional patterns that vary in length. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a length-aware Convolutional Neural Network to handle evolutional patterns of different lengths via an easy-to-difficult curriculum learning strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance under both offline and online learning strategies. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Learn and Review: Enhancing Continual Named Entity Recognition via Reviewing Synthetic Samples (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition classify mentions into fixed set of predefined entity types but in many real-world scenarios, new entity types are incrementally involved. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework Learn-and-Review for continual named entity recognition to alleviate inter-type confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art method on CoNLL-03 and OntoNotes-5.0. |
Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Zero-shot Can Be Stronger than Few-shot (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They introduce CoT to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability . however, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplar is still beneficial for recent, stronger models in such tasks. |
| Outcome: | The enhanced exemplars fail to improve the model’s reasoning performance, despite being constructed using answers from advanced models such as Qwen2.5-Max and DeepSeek-R1. |
Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Introducing **MARK**, a framework for cultural value survey simulation . based on type dynamics theory, it improves accuracy and interpretation of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates psychological theory into cultural value survey simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the World Values Survey by 10% accuracy and reduces divergence between model predictions and human preferences. |
Incorporating Syntax and Frame Semantics in Neural Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for machine reading comprehension rely on manually defined features and are difficult to generalize to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Syntax and Frame Semantics model for Machine Reading Comprehension which takes full advantage of syntax and frame semantics to get richer text representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ten state-of-the-art models on machine reading comprehension tasks. |
Mitigating Geospatial Knowledge Hallucination in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Dynamic Factuality Aligning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extensive world knowledge, but often generate inaccurate geospatial knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluation of large language models to mitigate hallucinations . they use Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to align LLMs with their reality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework uncovers hallucinations in 20 advanced LLMs. |
TR-Rules: Rule-based Model for Link Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph Considering Temporal Redundancy (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models suffer from temporal redundancy when leveraged under dynamic settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph extrapolation method which solves temporal redundancy issues by using cyclic rules to capture more information lurking in TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures more information lurking in TKGs, and also mines and properly leverages acyclic rules, which has not been explored by existing models. |
ChunkAttention: Efficient Self-Attention with Prefix-Aware KV Cache and Two-Phase Partition (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that ChunkAttention can speed up the self-attention kernel by 3.2-4.8 compared to the start-of-the-art implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-aware self-attention module that can detect matching prompt prefixes across multiple requests and share their key/value tensors in memory at runtime. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can speed up the self-attention kernel by 3.2-4.8 compared to the start-of-the-art implementation, with the length of the system prompt ranging from 1024 to 4096. |
A Frame-based Sentence Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine learning approaches do not have above semantic knowledge to address complicated MRC questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a frame-based Sentence Representation method which integrates frame semantic knowledge to facilitate sentence modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on machine reading comprehension task. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
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Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing social media data lack a systematic integration of medical knowledge, causing a critical treatment gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to integrate medical knowledge into social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to distinguish depression from transient mood changes. |
Planning with Multi-Constraints via Collaborative Language Agents (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural language models have sparked a new surge of intelligent agent research. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collaborative LLM-based multi-agent systems that simplifies complex task planning with constraints by decomposing it into a hierarchy of subordinate tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average success rate of 42.68% on two constraint-intensive benchmarks, TravelPlanner and API-Bank. |
RFS-Guard: Detecting Reasoning Hallucinations via Cross-Phase Routing Focus in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate intermediate reasoning traces before the final answer, yet they remain vulnerable to reasoning hallucinations such as subtle arithmetic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Routing Focus Score (RFS) that measures how strongly cross-step attention routing aligns with semantic proximity derived from hidden-state cosine similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects and localizes hallucinations without external tools or repeated sampling. |
CtrlA: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Inherent Control (2025.findings-acl)
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Liu Huanshuo, Hao Zhang, Zhijiang Guo, Jing Wang, Kuicai Dong, Xiangyang Li, Yi Quan Lee, Cong Zhang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on detecting LLM’s confidence via statistical uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a representation perspective to solve adaptive RAG by enabling dynamic retrieval during generation and enabling retrieval only when the query exceeds LLM's internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing adaptive RAG methods on a diverse set of tasks. |
Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge (2025.naacl-long)
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Li Zhou, Taelin Karidi, Wanlong Liu, Nicolas Garneau, Yong Cao, Wenyu Chen, Haizhou Li, Daniel Hershcovich
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates cultural context significantly and improves its ability to access cultural knowledge. |
Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English preference tuning to study cross-lingual detoxification of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity in multilingual LLMs by reducing the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations across 17 languages. |
Exploring Key Point Analysis with Pairwise Generation and Graph Partitioning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for key point analysis rely on semantic similarity instead of measuring the existence of shared key points . |
| Approach: | They propose a key point analysis approach with pairwise generation and graph partitioning to summarize arguments into a concise set of key points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing models on ArgKP and QAM datasets. |
AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, ML&DL methods fail to provide reasons for stock trend predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. |
| Approach: | They develop a method to train large language models to handle financial analysis tasks . they use AlphaFin datasets to compare performance with traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves stock trend prediction and financial question answering tasks. |
Trigger-Argument based Explanation for Event Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on ED use words or phrases to explain models’ inner mechanisms, but for ED, the event structure is more enlightening clues to explain model behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Trigger-Argument based Explanation method which can utilize event structure knowledge to uncover a faithful interpretation for existing ED models at neuron level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal the process by which the model predicts on the large-scale MAVEN and the widely-used ACE 2005 datasets. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction. |
Revisiting and Advancing Chinese Natural Language Understanding with Accelerated Heterogeneous Knowledge Pre-training (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Taolin Zhang, Junwei Dong, Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Ang Wang, Yinghui Liu, Jun Huang, Yong Li, Xiaofeng He
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) can capture internal knowledge, but can't understand external background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models to improve context-aware representations via learning from structured relations in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models outperform strong baselines over various benchmark NLP tasks and in different model sizes. |
Encouraging Good Processes Without the Need for Good Answers: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agent Planning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the dominant end-to-end reinforcement learning paradigm for agents in Large Language Models (LLMs) employs multi-objective optimization that jointly trains both planning and answer summarization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples the training process to enable a focused, single-objective optimization of the planning module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an 8%–12% improvement in planning performance compared to end-to-end baselines. |
PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for adversarial example generation are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level adversarial example generation framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model by adopting a sentence-level substitution strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance and robustness to noise on three benchmarks. |
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
| Challenge: | Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces . |
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)
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Yaozhen Liang, Xiao Liu, Jiajun Yu, Zhouhua Fang, Qunsheng Zou, Linghan Zheng, Yong Li, Zhiwei Liu, Haishuai Wang
| Challenge: | Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors. |
Clear Up Confusion: Advancing Cross-Domain Few-Shot Relation Extraction through Relation-Aware Prompt Learning (2024.naacl-short)
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Ge Bai, Chenji Lu, Daichi Guo, Shilong Li, Ying Liu, Zhang Zhang, Guanting Dong, Ruifang Liu, Sun Yong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot Relation Extraction (RE) are prone to confusion when applying knowledge to a target domain with entirely new types of relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware prompt learning method with pre-training to clear confusion by decomposing relation types through an innovative label prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous sota methods and yields better results on cross-domain few-shot RE tasks. |
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ." |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
An Empirical Comparison of Unsupervised Constituency Parsing Methods (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised constituency parsing are inconsistent due to data preprocessing, lexicalization, and evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose to standardize experimental settings for better comparability between methods . they compare existing methods with those proposed by decade-old models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than decade-old models on English and Japanese, respectively, compared with decade- old models. |
Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods, such as a n-terminal coding, do not provide accurate data for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that leverages attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on open-book QA datasets show that DAGCD improves faithfulness and robustness while preserving computational efficiency. |
Learning from Contrastive Prompts: An Automated Prompt Optimization Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt optimization methods often underperform due to learning exclusively from incorrect samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages contrastive prompts to distinguish between high- and low-performing cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize across open and proprietary models and NLU benchmarks. |
Reward Mixology: Crafting Hybrid Signals for Reinforcement Learning Driven In-Context Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning (ICL) performance rely on quality and ordering of demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that models iterative demonstration selection as a Markov Decision Process and craft hybrid reward signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines outcome-based accuracy signals with process-oriented signals like stepwise influence and label entropy improvement. |
Active Sentence Learning by Adversarial Uncertainty Sampling in Discrete Space (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing uncertainty sampling methods are time-consuming and can't be executed frequently. |
| Approach: | They propose adversarial uncertainty sampling in discrete space to find informative unlabeled text samples for annotation using adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on effectiveness on five datasets. |
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)
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Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages. |
Reasoning under Uncertainty: Efficient LLM Inference via Unsupervised Confidence Dilution and Convergent Adaptive Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhenning Shi, Yijia Zhu, Yi Xie, Junhan Shi, Guorui Xie, Haotian Zhang, Yong Jiang, Congcong Miao, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from overconfidence and computational inefficiency due to fixed computation budgets and miscalibrated confidence estimates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for computationally efficient, trustworthy reasoning under uncertainty using Diversity-Aware Self-Signal Dilution and Convergent Adaptive Weighted Sampling techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces inference cost by 70% while maintaining accuracy levels while reducing inference costs. |
Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate Chinese geographic semantics into re-ranking pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two Chinese benchmark datasets. |
EGSS: Entropy-guided Stepwise Scaling for Reliable Software Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Chenhui Mao, Yuanting Lei, Zhixiang Wei, Ming Liang, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS) is a novel TTS framework for software engineering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-guided stepwise scaling framework that balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropic-guide encoding and robust test-suite augmentation. |
| Outcome: | EGSS boosts performance by 5–10% across all evaluated models, and reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% . compared to existing methods, EGS reduces token usage and reduce inference time by over 20% . |
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing solutions on two benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, and outperformed previous best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4. |
A Parallelized Framework for Simulating Large-Scale LLM Agents with Realistic Environments and Interactions (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large language models lacks a realistic environment and parallelized framework to support complex interactions between agents and environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates realistic societal environments and parallelized interactions to support simulations of large-scale agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can support simulations of 30,000 agents faster than the wall-clock time with 24 NVIDIA A800 GPUs and the performance increases linearly with the increase of LLM computational resources. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
Leveraging Only the Category Name for Aspect Detection through Prompt-based Constrained Clustering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect category detection (ACD) aims to automatically identify user-concerned aspects from online reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on the category name of each aspect and a pretrained language model to generate constraints for clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than existing weakly supervised methods on nine benchmark datasets. |
Event Extraction as Multi-turn Question Answering (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to event extraction fail to model rich interactions among event types and arguments of different roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that formulates event extraction as multi-turn question answering . they propose to use reading comprehension problems to extract triggers and arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art on argument extraction tasks . it makes full use of dependency among arguments and event types, and generalizes well . |
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Zile Qiao, Zhuo Chen, Guangyu Li, Feiteng Mu, Mengting Hu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question . |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered . |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
Exploring and Adapting Chinese GPT to Pinyin Input Method (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a frozen GPT can generate state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin, but performance drops when input includes abbreviated pinyan, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese GPT to generate fluent sentences using abbreviated pinyin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on abbreviated pinyin across all domains. |
Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, but they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and taxonomy categorizes knowledge into four distinct types . aims to offer a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM research. |
A New Pipeline for Knowledge Graph Reasoning Enhanced by Large Language Models Without Fine-Tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional knowledge Graph Reasoning models learn the embeddings of KG components over the structure of a KG. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to integrate knowledge from LLMs into KGs without fine-tuning . they propose knowledge alignment, KG reasoning and entity reranking to enhance conventional models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can enhance the performance of conventional KGR models in incomplete and general situations. |
Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on entity representation and final answer reasoning, which results in limited supervision for this task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes relations to enhance entity representation and introduce additional supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1 score on two benchmark datasets by 5.8% . it improves by 6.7% on WebQSP, better than state-of-the-art methods . |
No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Current methods for training Large Language Model agents rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a critique and a policy to optimize the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments. |
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method with Semantic-Structural Alignment for Dependency Parsing (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing are often of the pseudo-annotation type, but they fail to consider the change of model structure for domain adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that accomplishes unsupervised cross-domain dependency parsing without using labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent performance improvement on CODT1 and CTB9 domains. |
Augmenting Operations Research with Auto-Formulation of Optimization Models From Problem Descriptions (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Rindra Ramamonjison, Haley Li, Timothy Yu, Shiqi He, Vishnu Rengan, Amin Banitalebi-dehkordi, Zirui Zhou, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems for operations research use NLP to suggest formulations of optimization problems. |
| Approach: | They propose an augmented intelligence system that can be used to simplify and enhance the modeling experience for operations research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system validates and edits the proposed formulations with a dataset of linear programming problems drawn from various application domains. |
AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing review quality are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that automates the discovery of interpretable features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a large-scale online platform with a billion-level user base. |
History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for Multi-session Open-domain Dialogue System (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain dialogue systems conduct one-session conversations, but multi-session MSCs are under-investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for multi-session open-domain dialogue . they propose to encode history conversations into a history memory and leverage historical information to generate well-informed responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale MSC dataset. |
MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
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Sheng Zhang, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yichao Wang, Xiaowei Qian, Wenlin Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for memory management struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reasoning and agentic search that grows fine-grained memory fragments from seed tokens from queries, then retraces and deep refines the memory via a contribution function. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 significantly mitigates memory dilution and more effectively activates reasoning potential of diverse LLMs. |
PychoAgent: Psychology-driven LLM Agents for Explainable Panic Prediction on Social Media during Sudden Disaster Events (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mengzhu Liu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chuan Ai, Chen Gao, Xinghong Li, Lingnan He, Kaisheng Lai, Yingfeng Chen, Xin Lu, Yong Li, Quanjun Yin
| Challenge: | Social media's rich information content and spatiotemporal granularity provide unique opportunities for emotion prediction and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a Psychology-driven generative Agent framework for explainable panic prediction based on emotion arousal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves panic emotion prediction performance by 13% to 21% compared to baseline models. |
IMCI: Integrate Multi-view Contextual Information for Fact Extraction and Verification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for fact extraction and verification fail to utilize multi-view contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate multi-view contextual information (IMCI) for fact extraction and verification by combining contextual information with inter-document context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the open-domain Wikipedia task with a winning FEVER score of 73.96% and label accuracy of 77.25% on the online blind test set. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
Beyond Templates: Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Demonstrations via Feasibility-Aware Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning datasets that are designed for powerful LLMs often lead to degraded performance when directly applied to weaker models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data adaptation framework that bridges the capability gap between expert reasoning trajectories and diverse SLMs by employing a selective imitation strategy guided by step-wise adaptability estimation via solution simulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and data efficiency over static fine-tuning and can be applied to large models with limited model capacity. |
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Yida Zhao, Jialong Wu, Liwen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Yu-Feng Li, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enabling LLM web search proficiency struggle with data production in open-search domains, while supervised fine-tuning struggles with data utilization efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without external human-annotated reasoning data. |
| Outcome: | EvolveSearch achieves 4.7% improvement over current state-of-the-art in seven benchmarks . supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains compared with RL . |
C-LLM: Learn to Check Chinese Spelling Errors Character by Character (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Spell Checking method that learns to check errors Character by Character. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 2.1% enhancement in general scenarios and a significant improvement in vertical domain scenarios compared to existing methods. |
Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aligned Large Language Models exhibit remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse to fine framework to fine-tune aligned Large Language Models to achieve a balance between speciality and versatility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. |
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)
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Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Zhengwei Tao, Liwen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Yong Jiang, Wentao Zhang, Zhiqiang Gao
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Xinyi Dai, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain. |
TacoERE: Cluster-aware Compression for Event Relation Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event relation extraction focuses on modeling the entire document . existing methods cannot handle long-range dependencies and information redundancy . |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-then-extraction paradigm for event relation extraction . they propose document clustering for modeling event dependencies and then a cluster summarization method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method simplifies and highlights important text content of clusters for mitigating redundancy and event distance. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback Framework for Large Language Model Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate thoughts with actions can cause irreversible error propagation . Xi et al., 2023; Zhang eet coll., 2023) have focused on enhancing large language model (LLM) agents capable of helping humans tackle real-world challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback to induce better decision-making for LLM agents by integrating a generator and an assistant to examine each action produced by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three widely used benchmarks and can integrate seamlessly with other methods. |
Integrating Semantic Scenario and Word Relations for Abstractive Sentence Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods only consider word relations or structure information, which neglect the correlation between them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Graph network for Abstractive Sentence Summarization that captures word relations and structure information from sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmark datasets. |
MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal document retrieval are lacking for evaluating performance of systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks . they use a rich dataset featuring 1,685 questions annotated by experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks. |
CodePRM: Execution Feedback-enhanced Process Reward Model for Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in code generation focus on optimizing the thought process, but lack effective process supervision, making it difficult to optimize the thoughts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM by collecting a large dataset of thought traces and then training it to take both the reasoning process and code execution as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and strong LLMs in the inference stage. |
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level relation extraction relied on implicitly powerful representations, which makes the model less transparent. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in relation performance and logical consistency. |
PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods struggle with document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model without further fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach that uses a pre-trained language model to rank candidates based on document embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing keyphrase extraction approach on six benchmarks. |
Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to living need prediction treat it as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture diversity and complexity of living needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system leveraging large language models for unrestricted need prediction that leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37% on real-world datasets. |
UERLens: Understanding Event Relations in Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event relation extraction (ERE) have focused on improving model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretability framework for understanding event relations in large language models . they first construct a counterfactual dataset that includes causal, temporal, and sub-event relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves event relation extraction by leveraging internal features to train a lightweight classifier. |
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence. |
Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotional Support Conversation task and an ESC Framework to train emotional support into dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides an example of an Emotional Support Conversation task and shows that it is more effective than existing models. |
Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting for Retrieval-augmented Language Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and pluggable knowledge rewriter that is optimized for LLM generation by supporting the model's supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to rewrite knowledge in a supervised manner. |
Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Text-based question answering (TBQA) has been studied extensively in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamically Fused Graph Network to answer questions requiring multiple scattered evidence and reasoning over them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results on a public TBQA dataset and produces interpretable reasoning chains. |
Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Earlier studies of instruction tuning on Large Language Models focus on creating large, varied, and high-quality datasets with responses curated by human experts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a smaller and weaker model to fine tune a larger and stronger model . they find it can largely speed up the data filtering and improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter instruction data faster and better on benchmarks. |
A Contextual Hierarchical Attention Network with Adaptive Objective for Dialogue State Tracking (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue state tracking ignore the slot imbalance problem and treat all slots indiscriminately, which limits the learning of hard slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ a contextual hierarchical attention network to enhance the DST by learning contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 52.68% and 58.55% joint accuracy on multiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets and significantly improves performance (+1.24% and +5.98%) |
AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to apply large language models to zero-shot next location prediction tasks are limited due to their limited computational power. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics. |
Towards Generating Controllable and Solvable Geometry Problem by Leveraging Symbolic Deduction Engine (2025.acl-industry)
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Zhuoxuan Jiang, Tianyang Zhang, Peiyan Peng, Jing Chen, Yinong Xun, Haotian Zhang, Lichi Li, Yong Li, Shaohua Zhang
| Challenge: | Compared to math word problems, geometry problems emphasize multi-modal formats and the translation between informal and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic deduction engine-based geometry problem generation framework that leverages a symbolic deduction engine to generate geometry problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids inherent biases in translating natural language into formal language and guarantees to control the generated problems in terms of knowledge points and difficulties by an elaborate checking function. |
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinnan Guo, Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks. |
ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in conversational information seeking (CIS) suggest a remedy for the lack of interactive clarification when people face unfamiliar domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully autonomous conversational information-seeking agent that couples large language models with a set of domain-specific tools to provide product demand clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can iterate over 2,000 automatically generated sessions and score high on real-world evaluations without human annotation. |
Giving Control Back to Models: Enabling Offensive Language Detection Models to Autonomously Identify and Mitigate Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models often rely on specific words to predict offensive content, compromising model fairness and potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework to help models identify and mitigate biases by integrating multiple natural language processing techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rate of models in in-distribution and out-of-difference tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements on larger datasets. |
MC-indexing: Effective Long Document Retrieval via Multi-view Content-aware Indexing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document question answering do not consider content structures, resulting chunks exclude vital information or include irrelevant content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that segments document into content chunks and represents each content chunk in raw-text, keywords, and summary views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves recall of long document question answering datasets compared to state-of-the-art chunking schemes. |
RAPID: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Long Text Generation with Writing Planning and Information Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-intensive long texts struggle with issues like hallucinations, topic incoherence, and significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented long text generation framework with writing P**lanning and I**nformation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a freshWiki-2024 dataset. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
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Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban aerial spaces remain to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate whether large multimodal models can process continuous first-person visual observations like humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. |
Identifying Collective Intelligence Factor in LLM Agent Groups for Generalizable Multi-Agent System Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on designing customized MAS for specific tasks . a critical research question remains: do LLM agent groups exhibit a form of "general intelligence" |
| Approach: | They find a Collective Intelligence factor in human groups that captures their general capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the ACI factor based on the features of LLM agent groups and can improve generalization abilities. |
LogiGraph: Logical Reasoning with Contrastive Learning and Lightweight Graph Networks (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods emphasize contextual semantics while others pay more attention to explicit logical features. Existing models utilize graph convolutional networks (GCN) for node updates, still exhibiting some shortcomings. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical reasoning method with contrastive learning and lightweight graph networks (LogiGraph) they employ conjunction and punctuation marks as two types of edges to construct a dual graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the GCN and employs conjunction and punctuation marks as two types of edges to construct a dual graph. |
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks. |
PolCLIP: A Unified Image-Text Word Sense Disambiguation Model via Generating Multimodal Complementary Representations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for word sense disambiguation lack images or senses in textual and visual datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified image-text WSD model that uses image-sense complementarity to generate visual representations for word senses and a disambiguation-oriented image-sensor dataset to provide implicit textual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 2.53% F1-score increase over state-of-the-art models on Textual-WSD and 2.22% HR@1 improvement on Visual-WSS. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |
Relation-aware Ensemble Learning for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to explore semantics of knowledge graphs have been proposed to explore these semantics in distinct ways. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage existing methods in relation-aware manner to learn an ensemble by leveraging existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has the same computation cost as general ensemble methods but with much better performance on benchmark datasets. |
Glancing Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation methods are either inferior to Transformer or require multiple decoding passes, leading to reduced speedup. |
| Approach: | They propose a Glancing Language Model (GLM) for single-pass parallel generation models and Glancing Transformer (GLAT) with only single- pass decoding, GLAT is able to generate high-quality translation with 8-15 speedup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous non-autoregressive methods on multiple language directions and is nearly comparable to Transformer. |
Don’t Just Say “I don’t know”! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies investigate ways to refuse to answer unknown questions . Large Language Models (LLMs) display a significant level of overconfidence when answering questions that they are aware of. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-alignment method to utilize Large Language Models to enhance its response-ability to unknown questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to baseline methods on four types of unknown questions. |
On the Sparsity of Neural Machine Translation Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models employ a large number of parameters, which leads to serious over-parameterization. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune parameters to improve the model by +0.8 BLEU points and to reallocate them to enhance the ability of modeling low-level lexical information. |
| Outcome: | The pruned parameters improve the model by +0.8 BLEU points and the rejuvenated parameters enhance the ability to model low-level lexical information. |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
SPPD: Self-training with Process Preference Learning Using Dynamic Value Margin (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve numerical and logical reasoning of Large Language Models are limited . existing approaches rely on prompt engineering and pretrained knowledge to ensure correctness . |
| Approach: | They propose to train LLMs with process-based reasoning using a dynamic value margin . they use the Bellman optimality equation to derive a value margin for step-level preference optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is equivalent to on-policy policy gradient methods under constrained reward functions. |
DeTriever: Decoder-representation-based Retriever for Improving NL2SQL In-Context Learning (2025.coling-main)
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Raymond Li, Yuxi Feng, Zhenan Fan, Giuseppe Carenini, Weiwei Zhang, Mohammadreza Pourreza, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | In-context Learning (ICL) has proven to be effective in a variety of complex tasks, but the selection of the most beneficial demonstration examples remains an open research problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration retrieval framework that learns a weighted combination of LLM hidden states where rich semantic information is encoded. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two popular NL2SQL benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
Generating Self-Contained and Summary-Centric Question Answer Pairs via Differentiable Reward Imitation Learning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a proposed model for question-answer pairs with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers is based on suggested question generation in conversational news recommendation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for generating question-answer pairs with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the central gists of the articles and achieves high answer accuracy. |
GRASP: Replace Redundant Layers with Adaptive Singular Parameters for Efficient Model Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that many layers are functionally redundant in large language models (LLMs), enabling model compression by removing these layers to reduce inference cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that removes redundant layers to reduce inference cost by preserving sensitivity-aware singular values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in 90% of the original model under a 20% compression ratio. |
CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory (2025.acl-long)
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Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Shiquan Yu, Ruiying Peng, Baining Zhao, Qian Zhang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing ground VLN agents struggle in aerial VLLN due to the lack of predefined navigation graphs and the exponentially expanding action space in long-horizon exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered aerial VLN agent that decomposes the long-horizon task into sub-goals with different semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvement in continuous city environments. |
Exploring the Limitations of Mamba in COPY and CoT Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Inference overhead of Transformers increases linearly with the sequence length, posing challenges for modeling long sequences. |
| Approach: | They analyze Mamba's expressive ability to perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks using a defined sequence length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks with a constant size while reducing computational costs. |
Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger (2025.acl-long)
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Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research expands the tool arrays of large language models (LLMs), but the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognition proxy proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, reflecting the model’s awareness of its own limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is fine-tuned-free and costs minimal. |
“Is Whole Word Masking Always Better for Chinese BERT?”: Probing on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a Chinese model with whole word masking has no subword because each token is an atomic character. |
| Approach: | They propose to use whole word masking to mask all subwords corresponding to a word at once . they ask models to revise or insert tokens in a masked language modeling manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better when one character is inserted or replaced . the model trained with standard character-level masking performs best when one token is masked . |
Dependency Parsing via Sequence Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing are transition-based, graph-based and sequence-to-sequence method. |
| Approach: | They propose to achieve dependency parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) by utilizing only the pre-trained language model without any auxiliary structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on DP benchmarks including PTB, UD2.2, SDP15 and SemEval16. |
Fusion Makes Perfection: An Efficient Multi-Grained Matching Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract unseen relations require laborious manual annotation . a new approach uses fine-grained matching to reduce manual annotation cost . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves inference efficiency and accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks. |
Context-Aware Sentiment Forecasting via LLM-based Multi-Perspective Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict sentiments on social media are limited and do not consider reciprocal influences among social media users. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective role-playing framework to simulate human response processes to extract sentiment-related features from social media messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves sentiment forecasting at microscopic and macroscopic levels. |
Do not Abstain! Identify and Solve the Uncertainty (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions rely on evasive responses when confronting uncertain scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' ability to recognize and address uncertainty . they generate context-aware inquiries that highlight the confusing aspect of the original query . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with ConfuseBench show that LLMs struggle to identify root cause of uncertainty and solve it. |
Enhancing Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with BranchLoRA (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are prone to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) existing approaches rely on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LoRA framework to preserve previous instruction alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose an asymmetric tuning-freezing mechanism to mitigate parameter inefficiency . branch-specific routers are introduced to ensure optimal branch distribution over time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks on the latest MCIT benchmarks. |
BrowseConf: Confidence-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Litu Ou, Kuan Li, Huifeng Yin, Liwen Zhang, Zhongwang Zhang, Xixi Wu, Rui Ye, Zile Qiao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence in LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use confidence scores to determine model answer quality and encourage model to try again until it reaches satisfactory confidence level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget methods. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang, Sheng Zhou, Xiaoxuan Tang, Fang Zhouhua, Zhiwei Liu, Dajun Chen, Yong Li, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. |
Defining and Evaluating Visual Language Models’ Basic Spatial Abilities: A Perspective from Psychometrics (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies assessing the spatial abilities of VLMs lack a solid theoretical foundation and lack measurable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric framework defining five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models (VLMs) it provides a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and methodological perspective for embodied AI development . |
Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Memory-Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Zhihao Jia
| Challenge: | Existing methods to finetun large language models (LLMs) only update a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetune process. |
| Approach: | They propose quantized side tuing (QST) which quantizes an LLM’s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the original weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the memory footprint of the model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations while reducing the memory requirements. |
Efficient Hyper-parameter Search for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning knowledge graphs do not search hyper-parameters efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient two-stage search algorithm which explores HP configurations on small subgraph and transfers top-performed configurations for fine-tuning on large full graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method finds better HPs than baseline algorithms within the same time budget and achieves 9.1% relative improvement on large-scale knowledge graphs. |
Multi-view Classification Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models only evaluated candidate triples from content information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view classification model where multiple views are performed based on both content and context information for candidate triple evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two representative datasets and improves performance. |
Beyond Itinerary Planning—A Real-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn and Tool-Using Travel Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM performance on travel planning have shown that existing settings are limited due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' planning and tool-use abilities in real-world settings by collecting user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates agents' capabilities in real-world settings and shows that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities. |
Analyzing and Modeling LLM Response Lengths with Extreme Value Theory: Anchoring Effects and Hybrid Distributions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat length as an incidental output property rather than a statistically regular phenomenon worthy of rigorous modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical framework for modeling and controlling large language model response lengths using extreme value theory and cross-validation on Qwen and DeepSeek architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves tail fit and generalizability while maintaining generalizzability. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning methods focus on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to predict query performance and cost required to accomplish a given task . they then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher performance at lower cost compared to baseline approaches. |
Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Sentence-level Extractive Text Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence-level extractive text summarization is difficult to model the importance of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a Frame Semantic-Enhanced Sentence Modeling for Extractive Summarization that leverages Frame semantics to model sentences from both intra-sentence level and inter-sentent level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms six state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark corpus datasets. |
Self-EmoQ: Plutchik-Guided Value-based Planning to Drive Streaming Emotional TTS (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems lack a self-emotion determination mechanism to drive the streaming text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotion-planning framework that determines the emotion prior to the textual generation, grounding the downstream emotional TTS in a streaming manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on DailyDialog, EmoryNLP, IMEOCAP, and MELD on emotional alignment, contextual coherence, and expressive fluency. |
ContrastKV: Robust KV Cache Eviction via Contrastive Signal Fusion for Multi-Query Generalization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing query-agnostic approaches rely on a single proxy query, leading to fragile eviction decisions under high evict ratios. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-agnostic KV cache eviction algorithm that exploits complementary semantic and non-semantic signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods while retaining up to 92% accuracy with only 20% of the KV cache budget. |
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingsong Zou, Jingyu Xiao, Qing Li, Zhi Yan, Yuhang Wang, Li Xu, Wenxuan Wang, Kuofeng Gao, Ruoyu Li, Yong Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to bypass security defenses of large language models (LLMs) are not effective, but QueryAttack can be jailbroken. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to examine generalizability of safety alignment by translating malicious queries into structured non-natural query languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve high attack success rates and jailbreak various defense methods on mainstream LLMs. |
MMD-ERE: Multi-Agent Multi-Sided Debate for Event Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research indicates that LLMs can be overconfident and stubborn. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent multi-sided debate approach for event relation extraction which explores the understanding of event relations between different participants before and after the debate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms established baselines on various ERE tasks and LLMs. |
Improved Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation via Ignoring Spurious Correlations (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train a multilingual NMT model for low-resource languages are lacking in terms of number of supervised examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use decoder pre-training and back-translation to solve the degeneracy problem by analyzing spurious correlations between source and decoded sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show significant improvement over the pivot-based approach on three challenging multilingual datasets. |
Diffuse Thinking: Exploring Diffusion Language Models as Efficient Thought Proposers for Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally prohibitive to explore diverse reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy. |
Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods for Large Language Models rely on unstructured pruning or require special hardware to accelerate computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP . they evaluate the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art pruning methods on 8 datasets. |
SpecCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Speculative Exploration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning chains. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that combines large and small models for effective reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces inference latency by 1.7-4.1 while maintaining comparable accuracy to standard large model inference. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |
Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning and Alignment Across Chinese Dynasties (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing temporal reasoning benchmarks rely on rule-based construction and lack contextual depth . a recent study found existing LLMs struggle with nuanced temporal understanding . |
| Approach: | a benchmark is designed to evaluate LLMs on temporal reasoning in Chinese dynasties. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark evaluates LLMs on temporal reasoning across Chinese dynasties . it emphasizes cross-entity relationships, pairwise temporal alignment, contextualized and culturally-grounded reasoning . results show existing LLM benchmarks struggle with nuanced temporal understanding . |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | SpikeVoice performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN . major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN and explores the potential of SNN to "speak". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. |