Papers by Yu Hu
Controllable Fake Document Infilling for Cyber Deception (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deter malicious intrusion generate multiple fake versions of a document that are context-agnostic and produce sub-optimal outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware model for creating fake documents that masks important concepts of varied lengths and then infills a realistic but fake alternative considering both the previous and future contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in generating highly believable fakes with moderate modification to protect critical information and deceive adversaries. |
Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Jingheng Ye, Zhendong Chu, Xuming Hu, Philip S. Yu, Carla P Gomes, Bart Selman, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current scientific reasoning models struggle with generalization across domains and fall short of multimodal perception. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal large language models to integrate text, images, and other modalities to enhance scientific reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can integrate text, images, and other modalities and improve reasoning across disciplines. |
From Selection to Refinement: Iterative Optimization for Instruction Data (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Hu, Ziyan Liu, Rujie Wen, Ruihui Hou, Xueyan Wu, Mu Zhang, Jianxing Yu, Tong Ruan, Jingping Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize instruction tuning datasets face two main challenges: unreasonable pruning of potentially valuable low-quality data and the persistence of noise or semantic drift during revision. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative framework for instruction data optimization that prunes low-quality data and refines low quality data using feedback-driven iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on seven public benchmark datasets with high data efficiency. |
SelfORE: Self-supervised Relational Feature Learning for Open Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use heuristics or distant-supervised annotations, but distant supervised methods make strong assumptions on entity cooccurrence without sufficient contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits weak, self-supervised signals by leveraging large pretrained language models for adaptive clustering on contextualized relational features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits weak, self-supervised signals on open-domain Relation Extraction . it bootstraps the self-supervised signals by improving contextualized features in relation classification . |
Safety Sidecar: Reflection-Driven Runtime Control for Safer Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety controls fail to provide runtime intervention or cross-architecture portability for autonomous LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic, plug-and-play module to provide arbitrary agent safety control and auditability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module improves the secure-solution rate by 2.9–11.2 percentage points . it adds only 3.2s to end-to-end latency and a negligible average cost of 5.37 10-4 per scenario . |
Multiscale Collaborative Deep Models for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models with deeper neural networks are difficult to train. |
| Approach: | They propose a MultiScale Collaborative framework to boost gradient back-propagation . they let each encoder block learn a fine-grained representation and enhance it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on translation tasks with three translation directions and achieves a BLEU score of 30.56 on the English-to-German task. |
CORD: Bridging the Audio–Text Reasoning Gap via Weighted On-policy Cross-modal Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hu Jing, Danxiang Zhu, Xianlong Luo, Dan Zhang, Shuwei He, Yishu Lei, Shikun Feng, Hai-Tao Zheng, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) exhibit a degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities . empirical results show that CORD significantly bridges the audio–text performance gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs online cross-modal self-distillation to bridge the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models . it employs on-policy reverse KL divergence with importance-aware weighting . |
When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using sports data, an LLM can analyze sports narratives to infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and draw conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to synthesize NBA basketball game narratives using real NBA basketball data and propose 'SportsGen' they find that most models fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns and open-source models suffer from significant score hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can evaluate LLMs’ reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. |
Automatic Table Union Search with Tabular Representation Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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Xuming Hu, Shen Wang, Xiao Qin, Chuan Lei, Zhengyuan Shen, Christos Faloutsos, Asterios Katsifodimos, George Karypis, Lijie Wen, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify uniability based on column representations are insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe column relation between pair of columns. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS to learn column relational representations in a multi-stage manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the SOTA baseline and on real-world datasets. |
Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song, Tiezheng Ge, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | generative models struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation . they propose pixel-level feedback to ground the Thinker's policy in pixel feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves image reasoning and generation quality. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
HGCLIP: Exploring Vision-Language Models with Graph Representations for Hierarchical Understanding (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Object categories are typically organized into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy . traditional uni-modal approaches focus primarily on image features, revealing limitations in complex scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines vision-language models with a deeper exploitation of the hierarchy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements on 11 diverse visual recognition benchmarks. |
VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results in complex, human-centered environments, yet evaluating their capacity for nuanced, humanlike reasoning and decision-making remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They introduce VIVA+, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and decision-making of MLLMs in human-centered situations. |
| Outcome: | The VIVA+ model is based on 1,317 real-world situations paired with 6,373 multiple-choice questions . it consists of three core abilities for decision-making: (1) Foundational Situation Comprehension, (2) Context-Driven Action Justification, and (3) Reflective Reasoning. |
Native Hybrid Attention for Efficient Sequence Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that NHA surpasses Transformers on recall-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid architecture of linear and full attention that integrates both into a unified layer design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture surpasses Transformers and other hybrid baselines on recall-intensive and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
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Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Approach: | They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
ScalingFilter: Assessing Data Quality through Inverse Utilization of Scaling Laws (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing quality filtering methods rely on a high-quality dataset as reference . Existing methods introduce potential biases and compromise diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance of pre-trained models without increasing training costs. |
Revisiting Data Reconstruction Attacks on Real-world Dataset for Federated Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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Zhuo Zhang, Jintao Huang, Xiangjing Hu, Jingyuan Zhang, Yating Zhang, Hui Wang, Yue Yu, Qifan Wang, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu
| Challenge: | Existing DRA methods fail to accurately recover the original text of real-world privacy data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a real-world privacy dataset to examine the performance of federated learning (FL) methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a real-world privacy dataset and shows that the tokens within a recovery sentence are disordered and intertwined with tokens from other sentences in the same training batch. |
Enhanced Data Synthesis for LLM through Reasoning Structures Generated by Hierarchical GFlowNet (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize instruction-response pairs lack a systematic design for the underlying reasoning structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reasoning Structure driven data Synthesis method that leverages a coarse-to-fine directed acyclic graph to construct reasoning structures efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in 48.50%, 84.00%, 79.90% of the synthetic datasets trained on the proposed model. |
DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profiles (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are ideal for decision-making, but they can be difficult to process when they are verbose and include repetition, hedging, and vagueness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios and integrates them with analogical reasoning to guide LLMs in making decisions in new situations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework separates the tasks of quantifying uncertainty and incorporating it into LLM decision-making. |
CHEF: A Pilot Chinese Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | CHEF dataset provides evidence retrieval over non-English claims . e-fact-checking is a time-consuming task, which can take journalists several hours or days. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset of 10K real-world claims that is based on annotated evidence retrieved from the Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides evidence retrieval as a latent variable and can be used to train and reason over non-English claims. |
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation datasets for large language models are limited to the English language and general domain, leading to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a medical dataset to assess the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs) . they propose to analyze medical text and generate rationales for their decisions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. |
Robustness Challenges in Model Distillation and Pruning for Natural Language Understanding (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, few studies have examined the impact of compression on generalizability and robustness of compressed models for out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation and pruning to reduce model generalization and generalization on out-of-distribution data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed compression techniques overfit on shortcut samples and generalize poorly on hard ones. |
DomBERT: Domain-oriented Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that learning domain-specific language models are equally important for general-purpose and domain-based learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-oriented learning task that combine the benefits of both general and domain-specific worlds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task solves the problems in an aspect-based sentiment analysis task. |
HiURE: Hierarchical Exemplar Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relational feature signals from natural language sentences use self-supervised clustering and classification that cause gradual drift problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that derives hierarchical signals from relational feature space using cross hierarchy attention and effectively optimizes relation representation of sentences under exemplar-wise contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract the relationship between entities from natural language sentences without prior knowledge on relation scope or distribution. |
Formally Specifying the Intended Behavior of the Program: LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Program Specification Synthesis (2026.acl-demo)
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Cheng Wen, Hu Junjie, YiKun Hu, Jie Su, Bin Yu, Dugang Liu, Zhiwu Xu, Weidi Sun, Shengchao Qin, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Formal verification typically requires developers to write detailed formal specifications . a formal verification system that generates candidate specifications is costly and error-prone . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven neuro-symbolic demonstration system that reframes specification writing as constrained structured synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces hallucinations and produces proof-ready annotations. |
Beyond Noise: Characterizing Creative Potential in Unverifiable LLM Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Yan, Chunhong Zhang, Haiyu Zhao, Ziyang Zeng, Zihao Liu, Yongkang Wu, Jianzhou Diao, YiJie Chen, Shujie Wang, Zheng Hu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models generate outputs that extend beyond established knowledge . prior work does not characterize the unverifiable space as a whole . |
| Approach: | They propose a novelty-verifiability characterization that distinguishes Creative Synthesis from Groundless Fabrication by a conceptual creation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distinguishes Creative Synthesis (Region A) from Groundless Fabrication (Regium B) it shows that Region A is non-negligible and robust, persisting across generation strategies, models, domains, and embedding choices. |
VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiliang Hu, Wenfu Wang, Zuchao Li, Chenxing Li, Yiyang Zhao, Hanzhao Li, Liqiang Zhang, Meng Yu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal conversational systems, current benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation across key dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark built exclusively on real human speech to fill this gap . they assess LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, robustness . |
| Outcome: | VCB Bench assesses LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, and robustness . VCBM Bench provides reproducible and fine-grained framework for Chinese voice chat bots . results show significant performance disparities and offer tangible insights for future improvements . |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie, Matrixmxlin Matrixmxlin, Liang Chen, Chenyun Yu, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | In-context learning of large-language models has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing . however, the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow paradigm method to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of large-language models through decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three datasets and improves the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. |
Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for neural machine translation only observe one source sentence at training time . this discrepancy in data distribution leads to a formidable learning challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose an uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation approach to capture universal semantic information among multiple source sentences and enhance hidden representations with this information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline and existing methods on translation 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. |
LORE: Continual Logit Rewriting Fosters Faithful Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using aspect-oriented summarization as a case study, we propose **LOgit REwriting**, a new controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM’s intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions while balancing that with accuracy. |
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting. |
PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to integrate philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a philosophy-grounded approach to assess medical ethics alignment . PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning . |
| Outcome: | PrinciplismQA provides a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing medical ethics alignment. |
Empowering Language Models with Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Language Models lack the power to store all required knowledge, resulting in a lack of ability to infer out-of-context knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Interaction Layer that can be flexibly plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
ℛ3: Advertisement Compliance ℛectification via Group-ℛelative Experience Extractor and Curriculum ℛeinforcement (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of content moderation are infeasible due to over-editing and compromise the advertiser’s original semantic intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to harmonize compliance with original intent preservation that integrates a data-driven framework and a curriculum to enforce compliance while maximizing semantic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on industrial datasets and on online A/B testing on industrial video. |
Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack transformer models are not effective at character level, but they are a natural attack scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-level adversarial attack method against transformer models . they use a gradient-based method to find the most vulnerable words in a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on sentence-level and token-level tasks. |
Generating Long-form Story Using Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-form story generation rely on rigid outlines or lack macro-level planning, making it difficult to achieve contextual consistency and coherent plot development. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement long-form story generation method to generate long-formed story with coherent content and plot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the fluency, coherence, and overall quality of generated long stories compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Two Streams, One Sarcasm: Orthogonal Expert Tuning for Holistic Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal satirical cognition hinder evaluation of multimodal Sarcasm Understanding . lack of a unified benchmark for holistic satire cognition hampers evaluation of MSU . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to decouple experts into orthogonal shared perception and private execution streams to physically block gradient interference between tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance on DocMSU-PLUS. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
SERE: Structural Example Retrieval for Enhancing LLMs in Event Causality Identification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various NLP tasks, but their effectiveness in ECI remains limited due to biases in causal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structural example retrieval framework that leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to help LLM models in ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to guide LLM models in causal reasoning, mitigating bias and improving accuracy. |
Improving User Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Robustness (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | In experiments, models perform well on test sets coming from the same distribution as the train data but their performance drops when evaluated on realistic noisy user inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a user controlled table-to-text generation task where users explore the content in a table by selecting cells and reading a natural language description thereof. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gains 4.85 BLEU points on user noisy test cases and 1.4 on clean test cases. |
Structure-adaptive Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Fake News Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for fake news detection capture domain-shared semantic features but fail to generalize well due to poor adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable structure knowledge transfer between multiple domains . they compare content-only and propagation-rich data to preserve structural patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn semantic and structural features across domains. |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiang Hu, Hongyu Fu, Jinge Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhikun Li, Renjun Xu, Yu Lu, Yaochu Jin, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate research ideas rely on retrieval or prompt engineering to generate ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses iterative planning and search to boost creative potential of LLMs by integrating external knowledge with broader and deeper insights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in generating 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation. |
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. |
A Dual-Perspective NLG Meta-Evaluation Framework with Automatic Benchmark and Better Interpretability (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics are insufficient to meet requirements for natural language generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-perspective NLG meta-evaluation framework that focuses on different evaluation capabilities and a method of automatically constructing benchmarks without requiring new human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves interpretability and provides better performance for 16 representative LLMs. |
BERT Post-Training for Review Reading Comprehension and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on question-answering has limited training examples for RRC . question-announced questions are a key component of online commerce . |
| Approach: | They propose to turn customer reviews into a large source of knowledge that can be exploited to answer user questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves review reading comprehension on popular language model BERT . it also improves aspect extraction and aspect sentiment classification tasks . |
ACQUIRED: A Dataset for Answering Counterfactual Questions In Real-Life Videos (2023.emnlp-main)
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Te-Lin Wu, Zi-Yi Dou, Qingyuan Hu, Yu Hou, Nischal Chandra, Marjorie Freedman, Ralph Weischedel, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | despite its importance, there are few datasets that cover multimodal counterfactual reasoning . a dataset focusing on this area is limited because of its limited coverage over synthetic environments . |
| Approach: | They develop a video question answering dataset that provides questions on multimodal reasoning . they ask questions about counterfactual hypotheses over visual events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows a significant performance gap between models and humans . it provides questions that span physical, social, and temporal dimensions . |
Knowledge-Enriched Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-enriched text generation poses unique challenges in modeling and learning . a roadmap will outline the state-of-the-art methods to tackle these challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a roadmap to tackle the challenges of knowledge-enriched text generation . they will dive deep into various technical components to illustrate how to represent knowledge . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial outlines the state-of-the-art methods to tackle the problem . it aims to show how to represent knowledge, feed knowledge into a generation model, evaluate results . |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data. |
Bi-directional CognitiveThinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reading comprehension are still in their infancy at the level of cognitive intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional cognitive knowledge framework to simulate reverse thinking and inertial thinking in the brain to answer questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task. |
Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for Low Resource Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora are laborintensive to obtain . Existing approaches use self-training to generate pseudo labels that will cause gradual drift problem or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction when no unlabeled data is available. |
Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Sequential Instructions (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing instruction-tuned models struggle to adhere to a query with multiple intentions, which impairs their performance when the completion of several tasks is demanded by a single command. |
| Approach: | They develop an automatic process that turns existing data into diverse and complex task chains and a new benchmark to evaluate a model’s ability to follow all the instructions in a sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can follow instructions better and deliver higher results in coding, maths, and open-ended generation. |
LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhendong Chu, Shen Wang, Jian Xie, Tinghui Zhu, Yibo Yan, Jingheng Ye, Aoxiao Zhong, Xuming Hu, Jing Liang, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes. |
| Approach: | This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems . |
| Outcome: | The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings. |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yang Li, Yajiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Maodi Hu, Mengting Zhang, Xi Sun, Hua Yue, Zhixiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is a key bottleneck for turning unstructured papers into computable knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific information extraction framework that solves a Sudoku problem as a progressive filling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the GPT-4o model on a document-level adjuvant dataset. |
In-Context Learning for Few-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot and few-shot learning dialogue state tracking are hard and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning framework for zero-shot and few-shot learning dialogue state tracking (DST) a large pretrained language model takes a test instance and a few exemplars as input and directly decodes the dialogue state . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in few-shot settings . it is flexible and scalable, and requires less data to adapt to new domains and scenarios . |
Entity-to-Text based Data Augmentation for various Named Entity Recognition Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing augmentation techniques manipulate words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit generative models that ignore preserving entities in the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Entity-to-Text based data augmentation technique called EnTDA to add, delete, replace or swap entities in the original text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique generates semantically coherent and entity preserving texts on thirteen NER tasks and two settings. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Li Hu, Guoqiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang, Shaoyin Cheng, Benlong Wu, LiGangyang LiGangyang, Xu Zhu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%. |
Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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Wentao Hu, Yanbo Zhai, Xiaohui Hu, Mingkuan Zhao, Shanhong yu, Xue Liu, Kaidong Yu, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models are vulnerable to hallucinations, authors say . static Top-k routing leaves "specialist experts" under-prioritized for specific tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework to awaken dormant experts . they propose 'counterfactual routing' to shift computational resources from syntax-dominant to knowledge-intensive layers . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoR improves factual accuracy by 3.1% without increasing the inference budget. |
UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model and a vision guider to refine the model’s capability to understand textual semantics in table images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a dataset of PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB and will be made publicly available. |
Sentence Simplification with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Sentence simplification aims to simplify the content and structure of complex sentences . prior work has focused on monolingual machine translation (MT) and tree-based MT (TBMT). |
| Approach: | They adapt an architecture with augmented memory capacities called Neural Semantic Encoders for sentence simplification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves on different datasets and improves human judgments. |
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuo Li, Yupeng Zhang, Pengyu Cheng, Jiajun Song, Mengyu Zhou, Hao Li, Shujie Hu, Yu Qin, null Erchao.zec, Xiaoxi Jiang, null Guanjunjiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect hallucinations suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate *information asymmetry* by combining a pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucinism rates. |
Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Writing arguments requires integrating high-level beliefs from various perspectives . current language models generate outputs autoregressively, resulting in limited diversity and coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a persona-based multi-agent framework for argument writing that integrates beliefs from different perspectives into a coherent narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates more diverse arguments by both automatic and human evaluations. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-industry)
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Yinghui Li, Shang Qin, Jingheng Ye, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shu-Yu Guo, Libo Qin, Xuming Hu, Wenhao Jiang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models’ performance as correctors on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) remains unsatisfactory due to the challenging nature of the task. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework EXAM that uses LLMs as explainers to enhance CGEC small models and a novel evaluation method SEE that utilizes LLM as evaluators to bring more reasonable evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the performance of LLMs on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) task. |
Context-Aware Interaction Network for Question Matching (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on word-level local matching and neglect the importance of contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware interaction network to properly align two sequences and infer their semantic relationship by using gate fusion layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can accurately align two sequences and infer their semantic relationship on two question matching datasets. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Shi, Aldrich Yu, Rongyao Fang, Houxing Ren, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Changyao Tian, Xinyu Fu, Yuxuan Hu, Zimu Lu, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks complex, human-like visual reasoning in large language models . it pre-trains the model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and fine-tunes it on MathCanvas-Instruct . |
Distilling the Essence, Discarding the Dross: Improving Fairness in Multimodal Large Language Models via Historical Reflection-Guided Prompt Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase MLLMs rely on handcrafted prompts that are brittle and difficult to generalize across tasks and bias types. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive self-debiasing framework that optimizes task-specific debiasers to suppress stereotypical outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework suppresses stereotypical outputs while maintaining performance. |
VIVA: A Benchmark for Vision-Grounded Decision-Making with Human Values (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence and proficiency across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for VIsion-grounded decision-making driven by human VA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make decisions under a vision-depicted situation using human values and human values. |
Sherry: Hardware-Efficient 1.25-Bit Ternary Quantization via Fine-grained Sparsification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ternary quantization is a powerful solution for resource-constrained edge devices . current implementations suffer from a fundamental misalignment with commodity hardware . |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-efficient ternary quantization framework that packs weights into five bits to restore power-of-two alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces weights to -1, 0, +1 while preserving power-of-two alignment. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Yahan Yu, Jinchuan Tian, Sheng Li, Ke Hu, Zhehuai Chen, Shinji Watanabe, Fei Cheng, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. |
Cautious Next Token Prediction (2025.findings-acl)
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Yizhou Wang, Lingzhi Zhang, Yue Bai, Mang Tik Chiu, Zhengmian Hu, Mingyuan Zhang, Qihua Dong, Yu Yin, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Yun Fu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding autoregressive models are temperature scaling and nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free decoding strategy that uses a model with a low perplexity score to select the trial with the lowest perplexities as the most probable and reliable path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. |
SportsMetrics: Blending Text and Numerical Data to Understand Information Fusion in LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can handle text and data, but blending text and numerical data presents significant challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose four tasks to evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of large language models in sports data analytics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of large language models in sports data analytics. |
Double Embeddings and CNN-based Sequence Labeling for Aspect Extraction (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent supervised deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but there are two other considerations that are important. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised aspect extraction model using general-purpose embeddings and domain-specific embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods without supervision and achieves very good results. |
Knowing False Negatives: An Adversarial Training Method for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction ignore the incompleteness of existing knowledge bases . current methods are too weak and cause noises when training and testing are not based on training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically align unstructured text with relation instances in a knowledge base . they use heuristics to leverage the memory mechanism of deep neural networks to find out possible FN samples . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two wildly-used benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. |
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking is radioactive and enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of watermark removal attacks that allow student models to perform untraceable knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks eliminate inherited watermarks while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead. |
Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu, Siyuan Liang, Ning Li, Zirui Hu, Weibo Gao, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Leszek Rutkowski, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing training data detectors fail to detect clean samples from contaminated test sets . existing methods fail to identify clean samples due to black-box nature of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data . they propose 'failure detection' to reduce the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false discovery rate (FDR) under valid FDR control while maintaining evaluation consistency. |
Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relationships from texts depend on memory size and replay these memorized samples in subsequent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model to extract relations between entities from texts where the samples of different relations are delivered into the model continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models and avoids catastrophic forgetting. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
Eliciting In-Context Learning in Vision-Language Models for Videos Through Curated Data Distributional Properties (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Emergent In-context Learning on Videos induces in-contact learning over video and text . eILeV-trained models outperform other off-the-shelf VLMs in few-shot video narration for novel, rare actions. |
| Approach: | They implement Emergent In-context Learning on Videos (EILeV) that induces in-contact learning over video and text by capturing key properties of pre-training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm outperforms off-the-shelf VLMs in few-shot video narration for novel, rare actions. |
AIR: Complex Instruction Generation via Automatic Iterative Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex instructions are resource-intensive and lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate complex instructions with constraints using a document-generated initial instruction and an iterative refinement framework to incorporate LLM-as-judge guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for generating complex instructions, and outperformed existing methods. |
MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free (2026.findings-acl)
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Yishu Lei, Shuwei He, Hu Jing, Dan Zhang, Xianlong Luo, Danxiang Zhu, Shikun Feng, Rui Liu, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) limited to textual input modality . acoustic information is intrinsically heterogeneous, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture to decouple acoustic information by routing audio tokens to specialized experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing models on audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks while retaining shared experts for global context. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
Improving Multilingual Sign Language Translation with Automatically Clustered Language Family Information (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on bilingual translation models, but multilingual sign language translation presents unique challenges due to the diversity of sign languages across nations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages sign language families to improve MSLT performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve balance between translation accuracy and computational cost by regulating the number of language families. |
Utility-Oriented Visual Evidence Selection for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation rely on semantic relevance or surface-level similarity, which are often misaligned with the actual utility of visual evidence for downstream reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent notion of evidence usefulness and propose 'surrogate-accelerated' framework that efficiently estimates evidence utility using lightweight multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while achieving substantial reductions in computational cost. |
FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster (2021.acl-demo)
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Yu Yan, Fei Hu, Jiusheng Chen, Nikhil Bhendawade, Ting Ye, Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan, Desheng Cui, Bingyu Chi, Ruofei Zhang
| Challenge: | Transformer-based models have made tremendous impact in natural language generation, but inference speed is still a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O to accelerate sequence generation without loss of accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can accelerate the sequence generation by 4x to 9x with a simple one-line code change for a set of widely used and diverse models. |
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Licheng Zong, Hongru Wang, Jingyan Zhou, Jingjing Li, Yichen Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Yu Li, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches to large language models face performance limitations due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search based on Monte Carlo Tree Search and a self-rewarding paradigm to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. |
One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
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Hongjin Su, Weijia Shi, Jungo Kasai, Yizhong Wang, Yushi Hu, Mari Ostendorf, Wen-tau Yih, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | a new method for embedding text is developed for tasks that require specialized encoders . INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddables tailored to different tasks and domains based on instruction finetuning . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions . they first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 70 embedding evaluation tasks with fewer parameters than the previous best model. |
InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiwei Qin, Kaiqiang Song, Yebowen Hu, Wenlin Yao, Sangwoo Cho, Xiaoyang Wang, Xuansheng Wu, Fei Liu, Pengfei Liu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) ability to follow instructions have not been able to provide a detailed analysis of their compliance with instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' ability to follow instructions and a benchmark for DRFR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric and benchmark compared with traditional scoring methods and explores annotation sources including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. |
WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Tianqing Fang, Jianshu Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Zhisong Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Web agents powered by Large Language Models lack the ability to perform in uncertain web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to reconstruct web agents' reasoning skills into chain-of-thought rationales by fine-tuning their LLM backbone into a web-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the agent self-improving benchmark OpenWebVoyager, demonstrating that it can be used to improve the agent's reasoning skills. |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
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Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Tang, Yu Xia, Yi-Feng Wu, Yuwei Hu, Chen Yuhui, Qing-Guo Chen, Xiaogang Xu, Xiangyu Wu, Hao LU, Yanqing Ma, Shiyin Lu, Qifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing strategies for spatial localization are limited due to their limited capacity to perceive positional data. |
| Approach: | They propose a location-based approach that leverages locational data to optimize interaction preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves SOTA results across offline benchmarks and real-world evaluations. |
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuzhe Yang, Yifei Zhang, Yan Hu, Yilin Guo, Ruoli Gan, Yueru He, Mingcong Lei, Xiao Zhang, Haining Wang, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Honghai Yu, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their potential applications in finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the ability of large language models to handle financial tasks using human expert evaluations and task-specific interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to handle complex financial tasks and combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. |
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. |
Language Model Based Text-to-Audio Generation: Anti-Causally Aligned Collaborative Residual Transformers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models excel in text-to-audio generation, but lag behind diffusion models by a non-trivial margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple isolated transformers with causal conditioning and anti-causal alignment via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LM-based and diffusion-based systems in audio synthesis. |
CycleOIE: A Low-Resource Training Framework For Open Information Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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Zhihong Jin, Chunhong Zhang, Zheng Hu, Jibin Yu, Ruiqi Ma, Qingyun Chen, Xiaohao Liao, Yanxing Zhang
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models rely heavily on large amounts of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that maximizes data efficiency through a cycle-consistency mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the quality of training data by curating low-quality datasets annotated by a large language model. |
GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension datasets lack an explainable evaluation of systems' reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset with multi-choice questions that evaluates MRC systems' reasoning process . they use sentence-level relevant supporting facts, error reason of distractors to evaluate MRC . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is more challenging and useful for identifying limitations of existing MRC systems in an explainable way. |
Beyond Modality Collapse: Taming Guided Modality Entropy for Omni-modal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoOmni is a data paradigm for omni-modal large language models that can be used for emotion reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data paradigm that interleaves guided tokens into reasoning traces to enforce structured evidence extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm over-relys on a dominant modality while neglecting complementary cues. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Mengcheng Fang, Tingwen Liu, Haiyang Yu, Zhongkai Hu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE are task-specific, resulting in specialized and isolated approaches for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve task-specific knowledge from pretrained language models to enhance universal IE by using a Meta-Pretraining Algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art on 4 IE tasks, 12 datasets under fully-supervised, low-resource and few-shot scenarios. |
An Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on parametric models that store knowledge in parameters or retrieval-augmented models that have access to external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a parametric parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters or a retrieval-augmented model that has access to external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method runs substantially faster across the board and produces more accurate results on WoW and ELI5. |
MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Leyi Pan, Aiwei Liu, Zhiwei He, Zitian Gao, Xuandong Zhao, Yijian Lu, Binglin Zhou, Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Irwin King, Philip Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) embed imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in outputs to identify LLM-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an open-source toolkit for LLM watermarking that embeds imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in model outputs to identify LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | MarkLLM provides a unified framework for implementing LLM watermarking algorithms, while providing user-friendly interfaces to ensure ease of access. |
Value–Action Alignment in Large Language Models under Privacy–Prosocial Conflict (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations measure privacy-related attitudes or sharing intentions in isolation, making it difficult to determine whether a model’s expressed values jointly predict its downstream data-sharing actions as in real human behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that sequentially administers standardized questionnaires for privacy attitudes, prosocialness, and acceptance of data sharing within a bounded, history-carrying session. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is stable but model-specific Privacy-PSA-AoDS profiles, and substantial heterogeneity in value-action alignment. |
GHAN: Graph-Based Hierarchical Aggregation Network for Text-Video Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text-video retrieval are limited due to structural and semantic differences between text and video. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end graph-based hierarchical aggregation network for text-video retrieval according to the hierarchy possessed by text and video. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves Recall@1 of 73.0%, 65.6%, and 64.0% better than the current state-of-the-art model. |
User Memory Reasoning for Conversational Recommendation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that update user preferences via asking relevant questions are unable to dynamically maintain and reason over their knowledge for current (and possibly future) recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new memory graph (MG) -> Conversational Recommendation parallel corpus with 7K+ human-to-human role-playing dialogs and a graph-based reasoning model that updates MG from unstructured utterances and predicts optimal dialog policies based on updated MG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a large-scale user memory bootstrapped from real-world user scenarios and can be easily updated from unstructured utterances. |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
AMR-based Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used dependency trees to extract relation between aspects and contexts, but there is a potential mismatch between the dependency tree and sentiment classification as a semantic task. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace the syntactic dependency tree with a semantic structure to capture the relation between an aspect and a context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves ABSA on four public datasets with 1.13% improvement over baselines. |
OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing MAS frameworks lack standardized abstractions, leading to low efficiency and repetitive implementation of core functions. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework that encapsulates agents, tools, and reasoning flows as pluggable atomic components. |
| Outcome: | The OxyGent framework provides a robust and scalable foundation for multi-agent systems in industrial environments. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs can confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering "I don't know". |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework that fuses evidence from multiple sources and iteratively revises the hallucinous content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. |
WXImpactBench: A Disruptive Weather Impact Understanding Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Climate change adaptation requires the understanding of disruptive weather impacts on society. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model to evaluate the capacity of LLMs on disruptive weather impacts by using a four-stage construction pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a four-stage well-crafted construction pipeline and requires two evaluation tasks, multi-label classification and ranking-based question answering. |
ESF: Efficient Sensitive Fingerprinting for Black-Box Tamper Detection of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in diverse applications, including code generation, legal document analysis, medical diagnosis, and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a fingerprinting method tailored for black-box tamper detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects tampering with a 99.2% detection rate using 5 fingerprint samples across state-of-the-art LLMs. |
MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that decomposes error detection into three phases with specialized agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization on real-world educational data. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
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Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
Learning to Generalize to More: Continuous Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) tasks require large amounts of parallel data to augment training. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation paradigm that augments each training instance with an adjacency semantic region that could cover adequate variants of literal expression under the same meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm improves on the state-of-the-art in supervised neural machine translation tasks. |
CharTide: Data-Centric Chart-to-Code Generation via Tri-Perspective Tuning and Inquiry-Driven Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Kuang He, Jiayi Hu, Ping Yu, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Peng Hou, Anxiang Zeng, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to chart-to-code generation are constrained by data-centric limitations . authors present a new framework that redesigns both training and alignment data . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric framework that redesigns both training and alignment data for chart-to-code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source baselines and is competitive with GPT-5. |
MR-ALIGN: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinming Wang, Jian Xu, Bin Yu, Sheng Lian, yi Chen, Boran Wang, Yingjian Zhu, Hongzhu Yi, Hong-Ming Yang, Han Hu, Cheng-Lin Liu, Xu-Yao Zhang
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that quantifies state-transition probabilities along the model’s thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations of four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning. |
Local Byte Fusion for Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing NLP models rely on a pre-built subword tokenizer to tokenize a sentence . this can be rigid and subwords from low-resource languages are under-represented . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for byte-based machine translation that aggregates local semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on multilingual translation and cross-lingual transfer . it is parameter-efficient and performs competitively to subword models, it is shown . |
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that many well-developed Visual Question Answering systems suffer from bias problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to mitigate bias problem by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets. |
Evaluating Robustness of Generative Search Engine on Adversarial Factoid Questions (2024.findings-acl)
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Xuming Hu, Xiaochuan Li, Junzhe Chen, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li, Xiaoguang Li, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Lijie Wen, Philip Yu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs)-backed generative search engines may not always be accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the robustness of retrieval-augmented generation in a realistic and high-risk setting where adversaries have only black-box system access. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits higher susceptibility to factual errors compared to LLMs without retrieval. |
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Yiwen Hu, Zhuohao Yu, Wenxun Dai, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-yun Nie, Ji-rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox 2.0 focuses on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generate text. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that integrates pre-trained language models into 13 common text generation tasks and 83 datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding datasets and incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLM. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual natural language inference lack annotated parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer for XNLI that uses a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings. |
Evaluating Test-Time Scaling LLMs for Legal Reasoning: OpenAI o1, DeepSeek-R1, and Beyond (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Legal-R1 delivers competitive performance across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate 12 large language models across 17 legal tasks across statutory and case-law traditions to determine their general reasoning performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across 17 legal tasks across statutory and case-law traditions. |
SAS: Dialogue State Tracking via Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with excessive information are inefficient and costly . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a Dialogue State Tracker with Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing to reduce redundant information’s interference and improve long dialogue context tracking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing models on the MultiWOZ dataset. |
PathwiseRAG: Multi-Dimensional Exploration and Integration Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation systems employ rigid retrieval strategies . static retrieval produces knowledge blind spots, missing connections between quantum algorithms and encryption vulnerabilities . |
| Approach: | PathwiseRAG addresses these challenges through intent-aware strategy selection . it constructs a directed acyclic graph of interconnected sub-problems and explores multiple reasoning trajectories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher accuracy and better reliability than current systems. |
PSP: Pre-trained Soft Prompts for Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method outperforms full-model tuning in few-shot abstractive summarization tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a soft prompts architecture with prompt pre-training and prompt fine-tuning paradigm to support few-shot abstractive summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Prompt Tuning and Profix-Tuning on CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets and outperfies Profix Tuning by a large margin. |
Scene Graph Modification as Incremental Structure Expanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Scene graphs are used in cross-modal tasks such as image retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that iterates between nodes prediction and edges prediction . they frame scene graph modification as a graph expansion task by introducing incremental structure expanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art model by large margins on four benchmarks. |
Conformal Event Prediction with Temporal Knowledge Graph (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current event prediction methods lack rigorous uncertainty quantification, which limits their reliability for decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal prediction framework that applies conformal predictions to event prediction to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework guarantees coverage while improving efficiency on three public datasets. |
Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer, we analyze ancient Chinese scripts . a large proportion of the characters in ancient Chinese are rare or undeciphered . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for ancient Chinese scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer improves on the part-of-speech tagging task on the Chu bamboo slip script. |
Understanding Pre-trained BERT for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show impressive results on aspects-based sentiment analysis tasks. |
| Approach: | They analyze the attentions and learned representations of BERT for aspects-based sentiment analysis tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used for aspects-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) but it is not clear how it can provide important features for downstream tasks. |
UAlign: Leveraging Uncertainty Estimations for Factuality Alignment on Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately express factual knowledge, especially in cases where the knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Uncertainty estimations to represent knowledge boundaries and incorporates these representations into prompts for LLMs to Align with factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the LLMs’ capacities to confidently answer known questions and refuse unknown questions on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on generative judges, but only on their judge ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of large language models to evaluate LLM responses across diverse scenarios, providing accurate preference signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on RewardBench with only 2% to 40% of the data required by other training frameworks. |
MedCite: Can Language Models Generate Verifiable Text for Medicine? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based medical question answering systems lack citation generation and evaluation capabilities, raising concerns about their adoption in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the design and evaluation of LLM citations for medical tasks and a retrieval-citation method that generates high-quality citation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior citation precision and recall improvements compared to strong baseline methods and correlates well with annotation results from professional experts. |
Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Incremental Meta Self-Training (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels are incorporated during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses pseudo labels to assess quality on unlabeled samples . they use a relation label generation network to learn from successful and failed attempts . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show the proposed method can improve on two public datasets. |
WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Code Large Language Models can address a wide range of code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate widespread and versatile instruction data from open source code datasets and use it to train code-related models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in generalization ability across code-related tasks. |
Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined the quality of labeled data in non-English languages. |
| Approach: | They annotate how datasets are created, input text and label sources, tools used to build them and what they study. |
| Outcome: | The results show that language-proficient NLP researchers' estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. |
SSR-A: Spatial- and Semantic-Aware Instructions and Curriculum Reinforcement for Advertisement Compliant Rectification (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fix non-compliant images suffer from over-editing, destroying original intent and perceptual similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for the minimalist rectification of non-compliant image ads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both compliance and preservation of visual and commercial consistency. |
Sparse Frame Grouping Network with Action Centered for Untrimmed Video Paragraph Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paragraph captioning videos without event ground truths generate one sentence for each event, but without event labels, it is difficult to locate the transitions between events and minimize repetition. |
| Approach: | They propose a module that dynamically groups event information with the help of action information for the entire video and excludes redundant frames within pre-defined clips. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all metrics. |
SALAD-Bench: A Hierarchical and Comprehensive Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | SALAD-Bench is a safety benchmark specifically designed for LLMs . it provides a robust source for evaluating both attack and defense algorithms . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical safety benchmark specifically designed for LLMs . it uses a taxonomy of questions spanning three levels and a robust taxonomies based on a QA pair . |
| Outcome: | The proposed safety benchmark shows that LLMs are resilient against emerging threats and the effectiveness of contemporary defense methods. |
Joint Learning Event-Specific Probe and Argument Library with Differential Optimization for Document-Level Multi-Event Extraction (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level multi-event extraction neglect the fine-grained difference between events in multi-documents, which leads to event confusion and missing. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-specific probe-based method to sniff multiple events by querying each corresponding argument library. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in the recall of multi-events. |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RLHF frameworks face inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers restricting their accessibility for newcomers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source RLHF framework that can be used to train large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training efficiency with speedups ranging from 1.22 to 1.68 across different model sizes compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while requiring significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. |
TextBox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Gaole He, Jinhao Jiang, Xiaoxuan Hu, Puzhao Xie, Zhipeng Chen, Zhuohao Yu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox is an open-source text generation framework that is modularized and extensible. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework that implements 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework implements 21 models on 9 benchmark datasets and is available under the Apache License 2.0 license. |
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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YiFan Zhang, Tao Yu, Feng Li, Chaoyou Fu, Yibo Hu, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Rong Jin
| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes . |
| Approach: | They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models . |
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. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Hongyi Wu, Xinshu Shen, Peimin Yu, Gaowei Yi, Xinhao Chen, Tu Hu, Yang Chen, Yupei Ren, Yadong Zhang, Youqi Song, Binxuan Liu, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing research on Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TOREE to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays to improve automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs. |
Multimodal Relation Extraction with Cross-Modal Retrieval and Synthesis (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve multimodal relation extraction information based on object, sentence, and whole image . they propose to synthesize the object-level, image-level and sentence-level information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal relation extraction. |