Papers by Yu Fan
GLGR: Question-aware Global-to-Local Graph Reasoning for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for multi-hop reasoning are lacking for local graph reasoning . existing approaches neglect local semantic structures in utterances . |
| Approach: | They propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach that expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a query node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on Molweni and FriendsQA. |
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihang Wang, Xu Huang, Bowen Tian, Yueyang Su, Lei Yu, Huaming Liao, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing context by removing redundant tokens are inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses information bottleneck theory to compress context . they propose to remove redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art . |
DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, they struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed and achieves 7.5% improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel. |
DocAssistant: Integrating Key-region Reading and Step-wise Reasoning for Robust Document Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on key information and generate answers straightforwardly . existing models ignore evidence from source documents and lack interpretability . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual encoder that fuses text into visual encoded visual encodes . they use multimodal large language models as data generators and checkers to generate step-wise question-and-answer pairs for document images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can answer step-wise questions without compromising the performance of the original model. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons: Retraining-Free Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures require loading all expert parameters . previous work focused on expert pruning and merging but focused on neuron-level structure . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic framework for expert pruning and reconstruction . it prunes redundant experts using router statistics, then decomposes them into neuron-level expert segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of experts and memory usage, making it easier to deploy. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
Enhancing Attributed Question Answering using Tailored Progressive Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Attributed Question Answering models are not yet leveraged to enhance their essential capabilities, including evidence identification, cross-source relation recognition and anti-distraction reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive progressive curriculum learning approach that optimizes both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models on the quotesum benchmark. |
Evaluating Generative Language Models in Information Extraction as Subjective Question Correction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern large language models (LLMs) perform poorly in elementary tasks like relation extraction and event extraction due to two issues in conventional evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate large language models by incorporating a human annotation schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation method improves matching between model outputs and golden labels. |
MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized product search methods assume that users’ query fully captures their real motivation, but in practice, user's queries do not always articulate the requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search method that embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs and utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in retrieval and ranking tasks. |
Balancing Knowledge Breadth and Task Depth for Effective Domain Adaptation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a lack of knowledge breadth and task depth can hinder curriculum learning in domains such as medicine and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-dimensional curriculum learning framework that coordinates model training along two orthogonal axes: the knowledge dimension and the task dimension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy on medical evaluations by 2.49% and on financial evaluations 1.2% compared with the second-best method. |
RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Zhihu Wang, Ming Fan, Xicheng Zhang, Yubo Zhang, Zhengfan Wang, Heyuan Huang, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce a module extension that integrates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAG+ outperforms standard RAG variants and achieves gains of 3–5% in complex scenarios. |
Computer Assisted Translation with Neural Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using neural machine translation to approximate human parity is difficult due to the lack of parallel training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for quality estimation and automatic post-editing of machine translation output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the English–German dataset and human translators can significantly expedite their post-editing processing with the model. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
Tokenizer-Aware Cross-Lingual Adaptation of Decoder-Only LLMs through Embedding Relearning and Swapping (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been primarily focused on English, leaving the multilingual ability unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that creates new tokenizers and tunes embeddings on fixed model weights for target language adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is light-weight and performant but has limitations for older models and high resource languages. |
One Refiner to Unlock Them All: Inference-Time Reasoning Elicitation via Reinforcement Query Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and lack the flexibility to fully activate their latent reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that treats reasoning elicitation as an inference-time alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 2.1% on average across diverse architectures and benchmarks. |
ClinicalMC: A Benchmark for Multi-Course Clinical Decision-Making with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess LLM performance in single-course settings and lack systematic evaluation in multi-course scenarios, where a patient’s condition evolves over time. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to assess their performance in multi-course clinical decision-making scenarios where a patient’s condition evolves over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model includes 1,275 Chinese and 5,804 English samples across four stages from admission to discharge. |
A Large Scale Speech Sentiment Corpus (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing corpus for sentiment analysis uses text inputs, but voice inputs are becoming more important as smart assistants and mobile voice control become more prevalent. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus by adding sentiment labels from 3 different human annotators for every transcript segment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains 49500 labeled speech segments covering 140 hours of audio. |
SPIDE: Serial and Parallel Intertwined Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenru Xu, Peixuan Xu, Ziqi Yang, Ming Hu, Zihui Wang, Jianzhong Qi, Rongshan Yu, Xiaoliang Fan, Cheng Wang
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a training-free SD framework that orchestrates dynamic alternation combining serial dynamic drafting with parallel draft verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a serial and parallel intertwined speculative DEcoding framework that orchestrates dynamic alternation combining serial dynamic drafting and parallel draft verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates inference while reducing the LLM usage costs. |
Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haiyang Yu, Yuchuan Wu, Fan Shi, Jinghui Lu, Ke Niu, Xiaodong Ge, Minghan Zhuo, Jingqun Tang, Bin Li
| Challenge: | Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese . current vision-language models struggle with visual complexity and poor adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Chinese ancient documents' visual/linguistic complexity . ancient documents are valuable cultural heritage, but they face challenges in digitization and understanding . |
| Outcome: | the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents evaluates VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning . ancient documents carry thousands of years of Chinese history and culture . traditional methods only scan images, while current models struggle with visual complexity . |
Alignment for Efficient Tool Calling of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in tool learning have enabled large language models to integrate external tools, enhancing their task performance by expanding their knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines probabilistic knowledge boundary estimation with dynamic decision-making to allow LLMs to better assess when to invoke tools based on their confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements in tool efficiency by reducing unnecessary tool usage. |
Fixing Distribution Shifts of LLM Self-Critique via On-Policy Self-Play Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models show impressive performance in a wide range of linguistic tasks, but their performance on complex reasoning tasks is still signif-icantly lower than the human level. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework to synchronize the reasoning and critique capabilities of language models by using Monte Carlo sampling to give appropriate rewards to the model's critique content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the model's reasoning and critique capabilities by 5.40 and 3.66 points, respectively, compared to the best baseline approach. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
Can Reasoning Help Large Language Models Capture Human Annotator Disagreement? (2026.eacl-long)
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Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan, Vilém Zouhar, Donya Rooein, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Mrinmaya Sachan, Markus Leippold, Dirk Hovy, Elliott Ash
| Challenge: | Variation in human annotation (i.e., disagreements) is common in NLP, but it is unclear whether it is possible to model this variation in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the influence of different reasoning settings on LLM disagreement modeling . RLVR-style reasoning degrades performance in disagreement modeling, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning settings improve LLM disagreement modeling, while RLVR-style reasoning degrades it. |
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step. |
Structure-Aware Zero-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs without External Knowledge (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Zero-shot Relational Learning depend on external knowledge, resulting in increased annotation costs and limited practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware paradigm that performs ZRL without external knowledge . it leverages intrinsic structural patterns in KGs to bridge semantic correlations for new relations with existing ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves 10.66% improvement in MRR while reducing annotation costs and enhancing practical applicability on three real-world benchmarks. |
CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (2025.findings-acl)
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Guangya Yu, Yanhao Li, Zongying Jiang, Yuxiong Jin, Li Dai, Yupian Lin, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Yongqi Fan, Qi Ye, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese electronic medical records-based dataset for MQCIC and propose CF-IR method that disentangles clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks fail against reasoning models enhanced by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak method that uses Chain-of-Thought reasoning to reduce harmfulness from jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed jailbreak method performs well against open AI models and deepseek-R1 reasoning models. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
Interview Evaluation: A Novel Approach for Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Question Answering Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for CQA use pre-collected human-human conversations . previous methods use model-predicted dialogue history instead of ground truth . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation approach that uses the model's dialogue history to evaluate models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing models and their evaluations on QuAC and CoQA. |
The Medium Is Not the Message: Deconfounding Document Embeddings via Linear Concept Erasure (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Embedding-based similarity metrics can be influenced by content dimensions and spurious attributes like the text’s source or language. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing algorithm that removes observed confounders from encoder representations and removes them from the encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on out-of-distribution benchmarks and on benchmarks, but performance is not affected. |
AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average. |
Fusion-in-T5: Unifying Variant Signals for Simple and Effective Document Ranking with Attention Fusion (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current document ranking pipelines involve multiple ranking layers to integrate different information step-by-step. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel re-ranker Fusion-in-T5 which integrates text matching information, ranking features, and global document information into one single unified model via templated-based input and global attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves ranking performance over complex cascade pipelines. |
Co-DETECT: Collaborative Discovery of Edge Cases in Text Classification (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Chenfei Xiong, Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan, Vilém Zouhar, Donya Rooein, Lorena Calvo-Bartolomé, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Markus Leippold, Dirk Hovy, Mennatallah El-Assady, Elliott Ash
| Challenge: | Social scientists often need to develop codebooks that can be reliable but require significant human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-initiative annotation framework that integrates human expertise with automatic annotation guided by large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates human expertise with automatic annotation guided by large language models. |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal content detection fail to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies and ignore inherent noise in multimodal features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal rumor detection method based on a frequency domain spectral selection method and entropy-guided uncertainty fusion method to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection . it shows stronger detection capability and robustness on multiple datasets . |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
ReCode: Reinforcing Code Generation with Reasoning-Process Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Bringing process-level supervision into RL often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for RL that integrates reasoning-process rewards with strict execution outcomes and a benchmark comprising preference pairs of superior and inferior reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the base version of ReCode by 16.1% and reaches performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo. |
Self-Reinforcing Controllable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data via Bayesian Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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Chongsheng Zhang, Hao Wang, Zelong Yu, Esteban Garces Arias, Julian Rodemann, Zhanshuo Zhang, Qilong Li, Gaojuan Fan, Krikamol Muandet, Christian Heumann
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesis of relational/structured tabular data lack effective feedback mechanism to optimize quality of generated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a relational data generator with dynamic guidance framework that uses chain-of-thought steps to generate tabular data for enhancing downstream imbalanced classification performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in both data fidelity and downstream imbalanced classification performance on real and synthetic datasets. |
Causal-Debias: Unifying Debiasing in Pretrained Language Models and Fine-tuning via Causal Invariant Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove unwanted stereotypical associations from pretrained language models (PLMs) are often focused on removing unwanted stereotypes from PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to remove unwanted stereotypical associations in pretrained language models . they propose bias-relevant factors are causal, while labelrelevant factors causal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces stereotypical associations after PLMs are fine-tuned . the proposed framework mitigates bias from a causal invariant perspective . |
GUI-Bee: Align GUI Action Grounding to Novel Environments via Autonomous Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work of GUI action grounding fine-tunes data from pre-trained MLLMs, but data is limited to specific GUI environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GUI-based agent to collect environment-specific data and fine-tune GUI grounding models with the collected data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be extended to other GUI environments to improve performance. |
Chase: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Dataset for Cross-Database Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | XDTS is a cross-database context-dependent text-to-sql problem with wide range of applications. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for cross-database context-dependent Text-to-SQL . they find that only 35% of questions are context-independent and 28% of SQL queries are easy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an exact match accuracy of 40% over all questions and 16% over all question sequences. |
HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | relying on large language models for information has raised concerns about reliability and accuracy of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories for various NLG tasks and propose HAllucination Detection models which integrate hallucinism detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Explain the Synth: Interpretable Evaluation of LLM Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a rule-based model as a shared explanatory language to examine the explanation of real versus synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares the explanatory structure induced by real versus synthetic data. |
Evaluation Agent: Efficient and Promptable Evaluation Framework for Visual Generative Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation agent framework reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
TLUE: A Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2025.emnlp-main)
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Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Yutong Liu, Nyima Tashi, Xiangxiang Wang, Thupten Tsering, Ban Ma-bao, Renzeng Duojie, Gadeng Luosang, Rinchen Dongrub, Dorje Tashi, Xiao Feng Cd, Yongbin Yu, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages, like Tibetan, remain underrepresented in large language models' evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark to assess LLMs' proficiency in Tibetan . they use a multi-task understanding benchmark and a safety benchmark to evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that most large language models perform below the random baseline, especially in Tibetan language processing. |
Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart (2026.findings-acl)
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null Chenkang, Fan Yu, Junjie Nian, Sihan Zhao, Zhuoka Feng, Zijun Yao, Wang Heng, Yu Minshen, Yixin Cao
| Challenge: | Experiments show that extended generation does not guarantee correctness . a recurring pattern in Long-CoT failures is a problem for large reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time control framework that truncates the trajectory before the trap segment and adaptively restarts decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TAAR improves reasoning performance without fine-tuning model parameters. |
UNO Arena for Evaluating Sequential Decision-Making Capability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhanyue Qin, Haochuan Wang, Deyuan Liu, Ziyang Song, Cunhang Fan, Zhao Lv, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs demonstrate powerful capabilities between tasks, but can they make sequential decisions? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate sequential decision-making capability of large language models (LLMs) using novel metrics based Monte Carlo methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves sequential decision-making performance compared to the vanilla LLM player. |
Text-to-ES Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Converting Natural Language to Elasticsearch Query (2025.acl-long)
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DonggeXue DonggeXue, Zhili Pu, Zhentao Xia, Hongli Sun, Ruihui Hou, Guangya Yu, Yupian Lin, Yongqi Fan, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent research on text-to-Query has explored using large language models to convert user query intent to executable code. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel semantic parsing task that leverages large language models to generate domain-specific language and post-processing code to support multi-index Elasticsearch queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1 on the large Elasticsearch Dataset (LED) and BirdES datasets. |
HoWToBench: Holistic Evaluation for LLM’s Capability in Human-level Writing using Tree of Writing (2026.acl-long)
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Andrew Zhuoer Feng, Cunxiang Wang, Yu Luo, Lin Fan, Irene Zhou, Zikang Wang, Xiaotao Gu, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating the writing capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge due to the multidimensional nature of writing skills and the limitations of existing metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the aggregation weights of sub-features in a tree-structured workflow and propose a Chinese writing benchmark that mitigates biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tree-of-writing (ToW) measures the writing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in Chinese and shows that it mitigates biases and achieves a *0.93* Pearson correlation with human judgments. |
Towards Efficient and Effective Diffusion Language Model Inference via Semantic-Aware Adaptive Denoising (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration works cannot accurately detect semantically stabilized tokens and then skip computation, leading to sub-optimal speedup in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware adaptive denoising framework that encodes scalar confidence scores into an evolution-awful feature vector and clusters vectors proactively and adaptively identify semantically converged tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA competitor in speed and quality . it can detect semantically stabilized tokens and skip computation, resulting in sub-optimal speedup . |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Multi-Granularity Fusion Text Semantic Matching Based on WoBERT (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-matching methods struggle with semantic nuances in short texts . a novel approach to improve text semantic matching is being developed . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity fusion model that harnesses a pre-trained language model to capture text semantic nuances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese short text matching datasets compared to traditional methods . the proposed model captures individual text semantic nuances and improves accuracy . |
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states . |
Incorporating Object-Level Visual Context for Multimodal Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-grained entity typing is superior to text-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called fine-grained entity typing to classify entities . they propose combining textual and visual contexts to capture fine-granular semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior classification performance compared to previous text-based approaches. |
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zelin Tan, Hejia Geng, Xiaohang Yu, Mulei Zhang, Guancheng Wan, Yifan Zhou, Qiang He, Xiangyuan Xue, Heng Zhou, Yutao Fan, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zaibin Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Chen Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Philip Torr, Lei Bai
| Challenge: | elucidating scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact during pre-training . they find that large models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws offer practical guidance for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training. |
Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of ‘value’ labels, but this lacks exploration of needs in user consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a consultation value assessment framework that evaluates historical consultations from three novel perspectives: (1) Scenario Scope Value, (2) Posterior Action Value, and (3) Time Decay Value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and commercial datasets on both retrieval and ranking tasks. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
Enhancing Distractor Generation for Multiple-Choice Questions with Retrieval Augmented Pretraining and Knowledge Graph Integration (2024.findings-acl)
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Han Cheng Yu, Yu An Shih, Kin Man Law, KaiYu Hsieh, Yu Chen Cheng, Hsin Chih Ho, Zih An Lin, Wen-Chuan Hsu, Yao-Chung Fan
| Challenge: | Existing LMs undergo task-agnostic pertaining, but task-specific pretraining has gained prominence. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval augmented pretraining and task-specific pretraining for DG . they propose to refine language model pretraining to align it more closely with downstream task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of multiple-choice questions by integrating knowledge graphs and language models. |
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic structures are crucial for capturing aspect-opinion relationships . syntactically based models struggle with linguistic complexities . |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic-opinion-sentiment reasoning framework that leverages syntaktic information to improve ABSA performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ABSA performance, though smaller LLMs exhibit weaker performance. |
Answering Complex Geographic Questions by Adaptive Reasoning with Visual Context and External Commonsense Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image is proposed . the task requires identifying the objects in the image and understanding the background context . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image . they analyze the image and describe its fine-grained content by text and keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to answer geographic reasoning questions based on an image . it can be applied to a large-scale dataset with 41,329 samples . |
Distractor Generation based on Text2Text Language Models with Pseudo Kullback-Leibler Divergence Regulation (2023.findings-acl)
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Hui-Juan Wang, Kai-Yu Hsieh, Han-Cheng Yu, Jui-Ching Tsou, Yu An Shih, Chen-Hua Huang, Yao-Chung Fan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for cloze-style multiple choice questions (MCQs) distractor generation are based on knowledge bases and pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to formulate cloze distractor generation task as Text2Text task and propose a pseudo Kullback-Leibler divergence for regulating the generation to consider item discrimination index in education evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art performance from 10.81 to 22.00 (p@1 score) |
VenusFactory: An Integrated System for Protein Engineering with Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-demo)
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Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao, Wu Banghao, Mingchen Li, Ruilin Wang, Lingrong Zhang, Huiqun Yu, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong, Bingxin Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained protein language models have been used in protein engineering, but their adoption is limited due to data collection, task benchmarking, and application challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed engine integrates biological data retrieval, task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |
Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explained to what extent LLMs extract conflicting knowledge from the provided text, but they neglect the necessity to reason with conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset for knowledge conflict resolution examination in the form of question answering that divides reasoning with conflicting knowledge into three levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset enables analysis of reasoning with conflicting knowledge in the form of question answering. |
Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that label slots and detect intent do not preserve hierarchical relationship between words, slots, and intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based neural network model which performs slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models and existing models on real-world datasets. |
ASTRA: An Automated Framework for Strategy Discovery, Retrieval, and Evolution for Jailbreaking LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods lack the capability for continuous learning and self-evolution from interactions, limiting the diversity and adaptability of attack strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework capable of discovering, retrieving, and evolving attack strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines in a black-box setting. |