Papers by You Zhang
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyang Cai, Jiaming Zhang, Junjie Zhao, Ziyi Zeng, Yanchao Li, Liang Jingyi, Junying Chen, Yunjin Yang, Jiajun You, Shuzhi Deng, null Xieruiqiii, Yuanting Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Jianquan Li, Liangyi Chen, Junwen Wang, Shan Jiang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images. |
| Approach: | They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks. |
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior. |
Domain Generalization via Switch Knowledge Distillation for Robust Review Representation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for review representations of unseen or anonymous users are limited by their in-domain nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-domain user and product information to generalize reviews . they use switch knowledge distillation to learn review representations for unseen users . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well for existing or anonymous unseen users. |
Revealing and Mitigating the Local Pattern Shortcuts of Mamba (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Mamba excels in tasks that involve localized key information but faces challenges with tasks that require handling distributed key information. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a global gate module into Mamba to address this problem by adding 4M extra parameters to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms attention-based models on synthetic and synthetic tasks with only 4M extra parameters. |
Are AI-Generated Text Detectors Robust to Adversarial Perturbations? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors for AI-generated text lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model’s robustness against adversarial perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baseline methods on four datasets and is more generalizable in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. |
Exploring Reversal Mathematical Reasoning Ability for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been a success in the wide range of natural language understanding and reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training method to improve general and reversal reasoning abilities by using a reversed dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves general and reversal reasoning abilities and alleviates the reverse curse. |
TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Haofei Yu, Keyang Xuan, Fenghai Li, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Existing research systems often design and use agentic workflows to perform research tasks such as ideation, scientific coding, review writing, and tree-based search. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. |
Efficient Domain Adaptation for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-parametric approaches like nearest neighbor machine translation have made small Autoregressive translation models less efficient . despite their impressive generalization and task performance, LLMs suffer from prohibitive inference cost when confronted with specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptation approach that tailors a k-nearest-neighbor algorithm for NAT models that incorporates the parallel nature of NAT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over the Base-NAT model and exhibits enhanced efficiency. |
ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) depend on costly fine-tuning and additional expert knowledge, which limits their scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time safeguard for Large Reasoning Models that injects safety aha moments into the reasoning process to guide the model towards harmless yet helpful reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safeguard outperforms nine existing safeguards while avoiding common exaggerated safety issues. |
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool. |
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning ability is a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), but RLVR training suffers from policy entropy collapse, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that provide detailed, constructive feedback on academic papers struggle with review fidelity. |
| Approach: | They explore factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems . large language models have shown remarkable progress in tasks from text generation to code synthesis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models in acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. |
APIRecX: Cross-Library API Recommendation via Pre-Trained Language Model (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | API recommendation tools can help programmers use APIs by recommending which APIs to be used next given the APIs that have been written. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-library API recommendation approach that uses BPE to split API calls in each sequence and pre-train a GPT based language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed APIRecX can recommend APIs that are previously regarded as OOV . it can migrate knowledge of existing libraries to a new library and recommend API that is previously viewed as OVO . |
LitVISTA: A Benchmark for Narrative Orchestration in Literary Text (2026.acl-long)
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Mingzhe Lu, Yiwen Wang, Yanbing Liu, Qi You, Chong Liu, Ruize Qin, Haoyu Dong, Wenyu Zhang, JiaRui Zhang, Yue Hu, Yunpeng Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language models focus on causal coherence, neglecting the complex story arcs and orchestration inherent in human narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-dimensional framework for narrative orchestration that unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. |
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. |
EvoHyper: Evolving Hypergraph Topologies for Unified Collaboration in Multi-Agent Communication (2026.findings-acl)
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Heng Zhang, Yihao Zhong, Lubin Gan, Zhihe Chen, Jiajun Wu, Yuling Shi, Xiaodong Gu, Hao Zhang, Haochen You, Jin Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-agent collaboration use a fixed communication graph and manage collaboration structure and shared memory in separate modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses an evolving hypergraph topology for multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 3.2% to 7.8% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art methods and efficient, reducing token consumption by up to 23.5%. |
INFORM : Information eNtropy based multi-step reasoning FOR large language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance with dedicated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method by introducing information entropy as a criteria on for CoT prompt selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on seven reasoning benchmarks using two language models. |
DatawiseAgent: A Notebook-Centric LLM Agent Framework for Adaptive and Robust Data Science Automation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents for data science automation are limited by narrow task scopes, limited generalization across tasks and models, and over-reliance on state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a notebook-centric LLM agent framework for adaptive and robust data science automation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines such as AutoGen and TaskWeaver in performance tests across diverse data science scenarios and models. |
Causal Reasoning of Entities and Events in Procedural Texts (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on entity state tracking or event reasoning is limited to procedural texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for causal reasoning of event plausibility and entity states . they represent entities as programming languages while prompting language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human reasoning and event reasoning. |
Music Audio-Visual Question Answering Requires Specialized Multimodal Designs (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenhao You, Xingjian Diao, Wenjun Huang, Chunhui Zhang, Keyi Kong, Weiyi Wu, Chiyu Ma, Zhongyu Ouyang, Tingxuan Wu, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Music audio-visual question answering presents unique challenges with dense audio-visual content, intricate temporal dynamics, and the need for domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They analyze Music AVQA datasets and analyze their results to identify key design patterns . they propose concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures are critical for success in Music AVQA, the authors argue . they suggest concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
LCAN: A Label-Aware Contrastive Attention Network for Multi-Intent Recognition and Slot Filling in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-intent utterances processing remains a persistent challenge due to intricate intent-slot dependencies and semantic ambiguities. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-aware contrastive attention network (LCAN) that integrates label-based attention and contrastive learning strategies to improve semantic understanding and generalization in multi-intent scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves intent recognition and slot filling performance in multi-intent dialogue systems. |
Memory-Driven Role-Playing: Evaluation and Enhancement of Persona Knowledge Utilization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to recall and accurately apply designated persona knowledge without explicit cues . memory-driven role-playing paradigms are attracting significant interest . |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-driven role-playing paradigm that frames persona knowledge as the LLM's internal memory store and a prompting architecture that guides structured memory retrieval and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides a comprehensive diagnostic for four-stage role-playing abilities across 12 LLMs. |
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
| Challenge: | a rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells has led to an exponential growth in research publications. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced system for perovskite solar cells that integrates three key components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing models in domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks. |
MA-BERT: Learning Representation by Incorporating Multi-Attribute Knowledge in Transformers (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating external attribute knowledge into deep neural networks are concatenating multiple attributes to word/text representation or treating them as biases to adjust attention distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-attribute BERT to incorporate external attribute knowledge into deep neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and models on three benchmark datasets. |
Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation generates target words sequentially while at inference it has to generate the entire sequence from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ground truth and inference to generate target words sequentially while at inference it has to generate the entire sequence from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Chinese->English and WMT’14 English->German translation tasks show that the proposed model can achieve significant improvements on multiple datasets. |
Large Language Models Are Partially Primed in Pronoun Interpretation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest large language models acquire rich linguistic representations, but little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. |
| Approach: | They examine whether large language models display human-like referential biases using stimuli and procedures from real psycholinguistic experiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models display human-like referential biases when exposed to referential patterns in the local context. |
AgenticRAGTracer: A Hop-Aware Benchmark for Diagnosing Multi-Step Retrieval Reasoning in Agentic RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks provide only final questions and answers, while lacking intermediate hop-level questions that gradually connect atomic questions to the final multi-hop query. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multi-hop reasoning model that is primarily constructed automatically by large language models and designed to support step-by-step validation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans multiple domains, contains 1,305 data points, and has no overlap with existing mainstream benchmarks. |
Graph of Records: Boosting Retrieval Augmented Generation for Long-context Summarization with Graphs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical LLM responses are lacking in long-context summarization tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph of records which leverages historical LLM responses to enhance RAG for long-context global summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four long-context summarization datasets. |
A Survey of Generative Information Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Information Extraction (IE) is a popular and fundamental task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They first review generative information extraction methods based on pre-trained language models and large language models focusing on their adaptation and generalization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on pre-trained language models and large language models, and emphasize the importance of model collaboration. |
SafeScientist: Enhancing AI Scientist Safety for Risk-Aware Scientific Discovery (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kunlun Zhu, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Nuoxing Shang, Zijia Liu, Peixuan Han, Yue Su, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet raised critical ethical and safety concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves safety performance by 35% compared to traditional frameworks. |
Improving Personalized Sentiment Representation with Knowledge-enhanced and Parameter-efficient Layer Normalization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on personalized sentiment classification consider document reviews as overall text unit and incorporate backgrounds (i.e., user and product information) Existing methods for personalized sentiment modeling have quadratic costs that increase with text length and heterogeneous mixes of background information and textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced and parameter-efficient layer normalization model that leverages pretrained checkpoints and background information into transformer structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve pretrained language models in document reviews and incorporate background information with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and knowledge injecting. |
Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocal and Accompaniment (2024.acl-long)
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Zhiqing Hong, Rongjie Huang, Xize Cheng, Yongqi Wang, Ruiqi Li, Fuming You, Zhou Zhao, Zhimeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on singing voice synthesis and music generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task called Text-to-Song synthesis which incorporates both vocal and accompaniment generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can synthesize songs with comparable quality and style consistency. |
DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haotian Zhou, Tingkai Liu, Qianli Ma, Yufeng Zhang, Jianbo Yuan, Pengfei Liu, Yang You, Hongxia Yang
| Challenge: | 6% of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models . they generalize Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent-Condensed Attention mechanism that performs structured context condensation directly within MLA's latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces KV cache size and attention cost without adding parameters. |
Why Prompt Design Matters and Works: A Complexity Analysis of Prompt Search Space in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a practical workaround, but most CoT-based methods rely on a single generic prompt like “think step by step” with no task-specific adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical framework that explains why some prompts succeed while others fail by using a generic generic prompt like "think step by step" they show that prompts function as selectors, extracting specific task-relevant information from the model's full hidden state during CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework explains why some prompts succeed while others fail. |
Seek-and-Solve: Benchmarking MLLMs for Visual Clue-Driven Reasoning in Daily Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomin Li, Tala Wang, Zichen Zhong, Ying Zhang, Zirui Zheng, Takashi Isobe, Dezhuang Li, Huchuan Lu, You He, Xu Jia
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ pre-existing knowledge or perceptual understanding, often neglecting the critical capability of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark designed for visual clue-driven reasoning in daily scenarios that combines rigorous grounding in authentic daily activities and challenging query design that necessitates more than surface-level perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies visual clues and their ability to provide robust reasoning in daily scenarios. |
Synapse: Empowering LLM Agents with Episodic-Semantic Memory via Spreading Activation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hanqi Jiang, Junhao Chen, Yi Pan, Ling Chen, Weihang You, Yifan Zhou, Ruidong Zhang, Yohannes Abate, Tianming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at generalized reasoning, but lack the ability to accumulate experiences and maintain narrative coherence over long horizons. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified memory architecture that transcends static vector similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in temporal and multihop reasoning tasks. |