Papers by Yu Li
REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) lack a narrow evaluation paradigm . a single-question evaluation setup suffers from two major limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a stress-testing framework that exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on reasoning benchmarks and state-of-the-art models. |
NeuralFSM: Adaptive Multi-Agent Coordination via Learning Finite-State Execution Policy (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-agent problem solving rely on hand-crafted protocols or automatically designed topologies. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-driven framework that formulates multi-agent problem solving as a finite-state execution process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on diverse benchmarks by 6.74%–19.39% while reducing token consumption. |
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Critical Step Optimization (CSO) focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. |
GLGR: Question-aware Global-to-Local Graph Reasoning for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for multi-hop reasoning are lacking for local graph reasoning . existing approaches neglect local semantic structures in utterances . |
| Approach: | They propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach that expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a query node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on Molweni and FriendsQA. |
UniCodec: Unified Audio Codec with Single Domain-Adaptive Codebook (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yidi Jiang, Qian Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yu Xi, Wen Wang, Chong Zhang, Xianghu Yue, ShiLiang Zhang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing neural audio codecs are not capable of handling multi-domain audio data . et al., 2023) integrate speech modality with text-based large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified audio codec with a single codebook to support multi-domain audio data . they propose combining a mix-of-experts strategy and a partitioned domain-adaptive codebook method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing codecs on acoustic and semantic representation capabilities. |
Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Generative Hard Negative Mining (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph completion (KGC) use generative methods with a self-information-enhanced training strategy to generate high-quality negatives. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage a sequence-to-sequence architecture to generate high-quality hard negatives from the same decoding distributions as the anchor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality negatives with good hardness and diversity on three KGC benchmarks. |
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
MTSA: Multi-turn Safety Alignment for LLMs through Multi-round Red-teaming (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak techniques rely on single-round interactions, pro-Corresponding author. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn safety alignment framework to address the challenge of securing large language models in multi-round interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits state-of-the-art attack capabilities while improving safety performance on safety benchmarks. |
When to Trust Tools? Adaptive Tool Trust Calibration For Tool-Integrated Math Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models have performance enhancements but still suffer from shortcomings due to limitations of the underlying language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the model to choose when to trust or ignore the tool results based on the confidence score of generated code blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the "Tool Ignored" issue by 4.1% to 7.5%. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Daocheng Fu, Jianbiao Mei, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Yufan Shen, Nianchen Deng, Jia Xu, Botian Shi, Yu Qiao, Haifeng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability. |
Dual Prompt Tuning based Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on hierarchy-aware text feature by exploiting explicit parent-child relationships, resulting in label confusion within each layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-prompt tuning method which emphasizes discrimination among peer labels by performing contrastive learning on each hierarchical layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
Enhancing Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Modeling with End-to-End Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-to speech (S2S) dialogue systems face key challenges in incorporating external knowledge into their models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly retrieves relevant textual knowledge from speech queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of end-to-end speech-tospeech dialogue systems while achieving higher retrieval efficiency. |
AIDA-SEAT: Towards Reliable AI Doctor Assistant via State-Evaluation-Action Tree Enhanced LLMs in Online Hospital (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Lianxin Sun, Xiaoying Ying, Guangya Yu, Weiyan Zhang, Chenhao Guan, Hao He, Mingxi Shang, Jianhua Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on large language models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) but these methods lack the explicit logical pathways essential for multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an AIDA-SEAT framework to provide reliable clinical decision-making support by transforming and modifying medical documents and doctors' state-evaluation-action trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.01% higher than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across five departments, including common RAG-based methods. |
Towards Modern Topic Models: A Survey of Taxonomies and Paradigm Shifts from Algorithm-Centric to LLM-Centered Topic Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Topic modeling (TM) is a classic unsupervised learning task in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
AGD: Adversarial Game Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Wanlong Yu, Zhihua Wen, Xinwang Liu, Kai Lu, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing defenses, including post-training alignment and prompt engineering, struggle with adaptability to out-of-distribution (OOD) attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial game-based defense method that dynamically adjusts LLMs’ internal representations to achieve a balanced trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ safety over all baselines. |
SumSurvey: An Abstractive Dataset of Scientific Survey Papers for Long Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a growing need for long document summarization datasets with 16k input is causing problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze salient information in long document summarizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models and LLMs in the distribution form of salient information and the distribution of salinal information is an indicator of quality. |
Learn and Review: Enhancing Continual Named Entity Recognition via Reviewing Synthetic Samples (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition classify mentions into fixed set of predefined entity types but in many real-world scenarios, new entity types are incrementally involved. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework Learn-and-Review for continual named entity recognition to alleviate inter-type confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art method on CoNLL-03 and OntoNotes-5.0. |
Hallucination Diversity-Aware Active Learning for Text Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for alleviating hallucinations require costly human annotations . Existing approaches focus on a specific type of hallucinism, which limits their effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect hallucinations from errors in semantic frame, discourse and content verifiability in LLM summarization using HAllucination Diversity-Aware Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the need for costly human annotations to correct hallucinations in LLM outputs. |
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Henry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition on Social Media (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multimodal Named Entity Recognition only extract entity-type pairs in text, which is useless for multimodal knowledge graph construction. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to identify named entities in text and their bounding box groundings in image . they extend four well-known MNER methods to establish a number of baseline systems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline systems on the GMNER task. |
Latent-Optimized Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sarcasm Detection (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for sarcasm detection are limited due to the difficulty in acquiring ground-truth annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized latent optimization strategy that allows different losses to accommodate each other and improves training dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms transfer learning and meta-learning baselines and achieves 10.02% performance gain on the iSarcasm dataset. |
Detecting Causal Language Use in Science Findings (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior studies on identifying inappropriate use of causal language relied on manual content analysis, which is not scalable for examining a large volume of science publications. |
| Approach: | They developed a prediction model that classifies conclusion sentences into “no relationship”, “correlational”, “conditional causal” and “direct causal” categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to identify the inappropriate use of causal language in scientific publications and news articles. |
Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Consolidation for Effective Multilingual Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual video corpus moment retrieval methods are based on a two-stream structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual video corpus moment retrieval task that uses a two-stream structure to generate a query-visual similarity and a subtitle stream exploits the query-subtitle similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on a large-scale video corpus moment retrieval dataset. |
Rethinking LLM Uncertainty: A Multi-Agent Approach to Estimating Black-Box Model Uncertainty (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Feng, Phu Mon Htut, Zheng Qi, Wei Xiao, Manuel Mager, Nikolaos Pappas, Kishaloy Halder, Yang Li, Yassine Benajiba, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Existing methods to gauge model’s uncertainty through self-consistency in responses to the target query are misleading: an LLM may confidently provide an incorrect answer to a target query, yet give a confident and accurate answer to that same query when answering a knowledge-preserving perturbation of the query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses multi-agent interaction to estimate black-box LLMs' uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing self-consistency based methods and improves hallucination detection. |
Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems perform poorly on unseen topics due to limited topics covered in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model that homogenizes different knowledge sources to a unified knowledge representation for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model generalizes well across knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks. |
Hierarchical Memory Organization for Wikipedia Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Eugene J. Yu, Dawei Zhu, Yifan Song, Xiangyu Wong, Jiebin Zhang, Wenxuan Shi, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating Wikipedia articles do not utilize memory directly for outline generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate Wikipedia articles autonomously by leveraging a hierarchical memory architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in producing informative and reliable articles. |
DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we construct a real-world Chinese dataset - DuReader_robust . |
| Approach: | They introduce a real-world Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness and generalization of MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to perform well on the challenge test set and may provide suggestions for future model development. |
Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can generate natural language texts for various domains and tasks, but their potential for clinical text mining is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a pragmatic taxonomy for AD sign and symptom progression based on expert knowledge and train a system to detect AD-related signs and symptoms from EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy outperforms existing methods using only the gold dataset and silver datasets. |
EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that student passion and perseverance, or grit, is associated with language learning success. |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed chatbot improves student persistence in learning a second language. |
Distantly Supervised Course Concept Extraction in MOOCs with Academic Discipline (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract knowledge concepts from MOOCs are noisy and incomplete because of the limited dictionary and diverse MOOC. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically extract course concepts using distant supervision to eliminate the heavy work of human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods with 7% absolute improvement in F1 score. |
How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid malicious user inputs. |
| Approach: | They employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can identify malicious and normal inputs and detect malicious ones without jailbreak. |
EmbodiedBERT: Cognitively Informed Metaphor Detection Incorporating Sensorimotor Information (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for metaphor detection rely on heuristics such as Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and Selection Preference Violation (SPV). |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitively motivated module that leverages the cognitive information of embodiment that can be derived from word embeddings and explicitly models the process of sensorimotor change that has been demonstrated as essential for metaphor processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can improve metaphor detection compared with the heuristic MIP that has been applied previously. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessing (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Our proposed task, TVShowGuess, builds on the scripts of TV series and takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines, yet lag behind human performance. |
ReFreeKV: Towards Threshold-Free KV Cache Compression (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Towards the KV cache efficiency, we propose a new objective that lifts the threshold constraints for robust KV compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts KV cache budgets while preserving full-cache performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce memory consumption while preserving full-cache performance. |
CLaMP 3: Universal Music Information Retrieval Across Unaligned Modalities and Unseen Languages (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shangda Wu, Guo Zhancheng, Ruibin Yuan, Junyan Jiang, SeungHeon Doh, Gus Xia, Juhan Nam, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Music information retrieval (MIR) is a field that aims at developing computational tools for processing, organizing, and accessing music data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns music modalities with multilingual text in a shared representation space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show CLaMP 3 performs state-of-the-art on multiple MIR tasks . it surpasses baselines and shows excellent generalization in multimodal and multilingual contexts . |
PepRec: Progressive Enhancement of Prompting for Recommendation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been gaining in-depth performance in natural language processing domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompting framework that captures knowledge from content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to boost recommendation performance with LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional deep learning recommendation models and prompt-based recommendation systems on two real-world datasets. |
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection for pure texts have limited results to multi-modal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal stance detection framework that leverages target information to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal stance detection on five datasets based on Twitter . |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy and propose 'agentic memory' to train such unified behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines on five long-horizon benchmarks and achieves higher-quality long-term memory and more efficient context usage. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Entity-level Prototypical Network Enhanced by Dispersedly Distributed Prototypes (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prototypical networks for named entity recognition suffer from label dependency and tightly distributed prototypes, thus causing misclassifications. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-level Prototypical Network enhanced by dispersedly distributed prototypes to build entity-level prototypes and distribute them dispersionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the previous models on two evaluation tasks and the Few-NERD settings in terms of overall performance. |
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kunlun Zhu, Yifan Luo, Dingling Xu, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Shuo Wang, Yishan Li, Nan Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ProvBench: A Benchmark of Legal Provision Recommendation for Contract Auto-Reviewing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiuxuan Shen, Zhongyuan Jiang, Junsan Zhang, Junxiao Han, Yao Wan, Chengjie Guo, Bingcheng Liu, Jie Wu, Renxiang Li, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Contract review is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly . a benchmark is proposed to detect potential legal conflicts . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for legal provision recommendation and conflict detection for contract auto-reviewing which aims to recommend the legal provisions related to contract clauses and detect possible legal conflicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task recommends legal provisions related to contract clauses and detects legal conflicts. |
Automated CAD Modeling Sequence Generation from Text Descriptions via Transformer-Based Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
JianXing Liao, Junyan Xu, Yatao Sun, Maowen Tang, Sicheng He, Jingxian Liao, Shui Yu, Yun Li, Xiaohong Guan
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in both accuracy and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided framework that integrates large language models with computer-automated design to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods in accuracy and efficiency, providing a powerful tool for automating industrial workflows and generating complex CAD models from textual prompts. |
Legal Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs: Procedural Alignment through Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing legal mathematical reasoning models lack structured numerical reasoning . existing models perform poorly on LexNum, while LexPam improves both mathematical accuracy and legal coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal mathematical reasoning benchmark LexNum and LexPam to address this problem . LexPam is a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for efficient legal reasoning training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves mathematical accuracy and legal coherence . it also improves legal cohesion and generalizes effectively across tasks and domains. |
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering (2025.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating information across multiple modalities are suboptimal for multi-page, multimodal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive iterative framework that balances information gain and uncertainty reduction at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures relevant multimodal content and achieves strong performance on complex QA tasks. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
IOPO: Empowering LLMs with Complex Instruction Following via Input-Output Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms to improve the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to improve the ability to follow complex instructions by using a IOPO alignment method to take input and output preference into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm shows 8.15%, 2.18% improvements on in-domain data and 5.91%, 2.83% on out-of-domain datasets compared to SFT and DPO respectively. |
ScalingFilter: Assessing Data Quality through Inverse Utilization of Scaling Laws (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. |
Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Pavan Kapanipathi, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Srinivas Ravishankar, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Maria Chang, Cristina Cornelio, Saswati Dana, Achille Fokoue, Dinesh Garg, Alfio Gliozzo, Sairam Gurajada, Hima Karanam, Naweed Khan, Dinesh Khandelwal, Young-Suk Lee, Yunyao Li, Francois Luus, Ndivhuwo Makondo, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Tahira Naseem, Sumit Neelam, Lucian Popa, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ryan Riegel, Gaetano Rossiello, Udit Sharma, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Mo Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches face challenges including complex question understanding and lack of large end-to-end training datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular knowledge base question answering system that leverages AMR parses for task-independent question understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two prominent KBQA datasets based on DBpedia. |
WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have developed watermarking algorithms which restrict the generation process to leave an invisible trace for watermark detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking procedure that compares different methods to ensure consistent watermarking strength and jointly evaluates their generation and detection performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares 4 open-source watermarks on 2 LLMs under 2 watermarking strengths and observes the common struggles for current methods on maintaining the generation quality. |
From Synthesis to Clinical Assistance: A Strategy-Aware Agent Framework for Autism Intervention based on Real Clinical Dataset (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the gold standard for clinical intervention, but large language models struggle to adhere to its standardized procedures. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy-aware framework to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts. |
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Ritwik Sinha, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent advances in chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated the ability of large language models to perform multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze latent dynamics of CoT trajectories for interpretability . they segment generated CoT into discrete reasoning steps and abstract each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework segments generated CoT steps into discrete reasoning steps, abstracts each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices, and clusters these embeddements into semantically meaningful latent states. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Topology-of-Question-Decomposition: Enhancing Large Language Models with Information Retrieval for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are constrained to chaining immediate reasoning steps and relying solely on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that activates retrieval only when necessary to improve answer accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Lin Li, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, anaphora resolution and ellipses resolution are limited in dialogues . despite rapid progress in dialogue systems, several difficulties remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on a rewritten dialogue dataset. |
Instruction Fusion: Advancing Prompt Evolution through Hybridization (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEva+, MBPP, mbap+ and MultiPL-E. |
How Well Do LLMs Handle Cantonese? Benchmarking Cantonese Capabilities of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Cantonese LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonesian. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models will evaluate Cantonese's performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantone. |
Large Language Models in Bioinformatics: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing bioinformatics, enabling advanced analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, and single-cell data. |
| Approach: | They examine the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) in bioinformatics and precision medicine by focusing on genomic sequence modeling, RNA structure prediction, protein function inference, and single-cell transcriptomics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are capable of predicting RNA structure and function and predicting single-cell transcriptomics. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e-commerce and recommender systems lack a framework for personalized generation . a new framework extracts tags from multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts tags from multimodal information and rewrites item description . they then use a decoupled text-to-text and image-to image retriever to search for similar item text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate results aligned with user preferences . it can be used in e-commerce and recommender systems to win over diverse user base . |
Selective Differential Privacy for Language Modeling (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect sensitive data from leaking are over-pessimistic and undifferentiated. |
| Approach: | They propose a new privacy notion, selective differential privacy, to provide rigorous privacy guarantees on the sensitive portion of the data to improve model utility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed privacy-preserving mechanism achieves better utility while remaining safe under various privacy attacks compared to baselines. |
Rethinking Sentiment Style Transfer (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text style transfer are unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based method to extract attribute content from sentences . they propose an efficient regularization to leverage attribute-dependent content as guiding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a YELP and IMDB dataset and it is able to detect errors in the human evaluation. |
Detecting Subtle Differences between Human and Model Languages Using Spectrum of Relative Likelihood (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting modelgenerated texts from human texts are limited by the fact that absolute likelihood values of texts are bound to certain linguistic and cognitive constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use relative likelihood values instead of absolute ones to extract useful features from the spectrum-view of likelihood for the human-model text detection task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal subtle differences between human and model languages, which find theoretical roots in psycholinguistics studies. |
Enhancing Auto-regressive Chain-of-Thought through Loop-Aligned Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a powerful technique for enhancing language model’s reasoning capabilities, but generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose to align the steps of Chain-of-Thought reasoning with loop iterations and apply intermediate supervision during the training of Looped Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates accurate reasoning chains for complex problems exceeding training length, and improves performance of the auto-regressive model. |
Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Story video-text alignment is a core task in computational story understanding, but its progress has been held back by the scarcity of manually annotated video- text correspondences and the heavy concentration on English narrations of Hollywood movies. |
| Approach: | They construct a multilingual video story dataset with 13,166 movie summary videos from 7 languages and manual annotations of fine-grained video-text correspondences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the SOTA methods on clip accuracy and Sentence IoU scores. |
Enhanced Data Synthesis for LLM through Reasoning Structures Generated by Hierarchical GFlowNet (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve applying preference learning to step-wise solution pairs, but they overlook critical subtle errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference learning framework that injects predefined subtle errors into pivotal tokens to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework improves on Qwen2-7B-Instruct and MATH with 4.5K training samples. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that failures of large language models in social contexts are not due to limited linguistic competence, but to inappropriate recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conduct controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conducts controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their capabilities in cryptographic decryption tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
Evaluating Text Generation Quality Using Spectral Distances of Surprisal (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metric fails to capture text surprisal, but FACE-2 produces stronger agreement with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a new automatic evaluation metric for open-ended text generation . they propose metric that extracts the dynamic patterns (spectrum) of text surprisal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing methods in revealing the model scaling effect . it produces stronger agreement with human preferences from a large human-annotated dataset . |
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for sequence labeling are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback . they identify context and feedback biases by formulating interactive sequence labels via a Structural Causal Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can effectively alleviate the biases and can be learnt with the user feedback. |
TaCIE: Enhancing Instruction Comprehension in Large Language Models through Task-Centred Instruction Evolution (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks. |
T2I-FactualBench: Benchmarking the Factuality of Text-to-Image Models with Knowledge-Intensive Concepts (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwei Huang, Wanggui He, Quanyu Long, Yandi Wang, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Fangxun Shu, Weilong Dai, Hao Jiang, Fei Wu, Leilei Gan
| Challenge: | Existing studies on text-to-image (T2I) models focus on text alignment, image quality, and object composition capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a T2I-FactualBench benchmark to evaluate the factuality of knowledge-intensive concept generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the factuality of knowledge-intensive concept generation tasks. |
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning and continual learning methods compress visual representations and emphasize task alignment over visual retention. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-decoupled gradient descent (MDGD) that regulates gradient updates to preserve effective rank of visual features and explicitly disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces visual forgetting and improves visual retention . it disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment and preserves effective rank . |
Exploiting the Index Gradients for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite advances in training Large Language Models, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak, an adversarial attack method. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial jailbreak algorithm that exploits the gradient information of the suffix tokens to accelerate the optimization process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.5x speedup while maintaining high attack success rates. |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
It is AI’s Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question-Answer Pair Generation for Children’s Story Books (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) techniques are created mainly to answer questions asked by humans, but in educational applications, teachers often need to decide what questions to ask . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fairytale-themed storybook as input to generate QA pairs that can test a student's comprehension skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art QAG baseline systems and builds an interactive story-telling application for the future real-world deployment. |
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinghan Yu, Junhao Xiao, Chenyu Zhu, Jiaming Li, Jia Li, HanMing Deng, Xirui Wang, Guoli Jia, Jianjun Li, Xiang Bai, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Ma
| Challenge: | Existing text-guided image editing methods rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm . existing models lack such intermediate representations and Reasoning-then-action process . |
| Approach: | They propose a "Decompose-then-Action" paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods in compositional editing tasks. |
PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for adversarial example generation are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level adversarial example generation framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model by adopting a sentence-level substitution strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance and robustness to noise on three benchmarks. |
When Long Helps Short: How Context Length in Supervised Fine-tuning Affects Behavior of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use long-context SFT to improve short-contemporary performance . they also decouple and analyze two key components, Multi-Head Attention and Feed-Forward Network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves short-context performance, contrary to pretraining. |
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases . a single-domain task evaluates the performance on identical databases based on the same domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-domain text-to-SQL task that parses user questions into SQL on unseen databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases. |
Align2LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hongzhe Huang, Jiang Liu, Zhewen Yu, Li Cai, Dian Jiao, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li, Hao Jiang, Haoyuan Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduce significant variability in data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and LLM preference alignment to compress large corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions into a compact and high-quality form. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms LLaVA-series models in MLLM benchmarks by 90% . it uses human and LLM preference alignment to compress a large dataset . |
A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs de-emphasize temporal correlations between facts sequences and ignore inferring clues from missing facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal PAth-based reasoning model that is robust to ambiguous temporal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task. |
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linzhuang Sun, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liang, Ruitong Liu, Yuying Li, Qifeng Cai, Jingxuan Wei, Yuchen Wu, Bihui Yu, Xiangxiang Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance LLMs' context awareness by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network module to maximize the likelihood of the prompt before inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6% and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. |
Evaluating Generative Language Models in Information Extraction as Subjective Question Correction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern large language models (LLMs) perform poorly in elementary tasks like relation extraction and event extraction due to two issues in conventional evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate large language models by incorporating a human annotation schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation method improves matching between model outputs and golden labels. |
Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropies drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks while maintaining high-entropy exploration. |
HiURE: Hierarchical Exemplar Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
CoBa: Convergence Balancer for Multitask Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-task learning approaches for large language models fall short due to computational intensive or lack of simultaneous task convergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a new multi-task learning approach that dynamically adjusts task weights during the training process, ensuring that the validation loss of all tasks progresses towards convergence at an even pace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models by up to 13% compared to the second-best approaches. |
UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chaoyun Zhang, Liqun Li, Shilin He, Xu Zhang, Bo Qiao, Si Qin, Minghua Ma, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | UFO is a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications . it decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a UI-Fcused Windows OS agent that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach and incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
WIKIGENBENCH:Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiebin Zhang, Eugene J. Yu, Qinyu Chen, Chenhao Xiong, Dawei Zhu, Han Qian, Mingbo Song, Weimin Xiong, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate Wikipedia articles for new events fall short of real-world application. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to generate Wikipedia articles for new events under real-world scenarios . they use systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-life scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that hierarchical-based methods generate more comprehensive content while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability. |
DI-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Dependency Inference with Testable Repositories at Scale (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linghao Zhang, Junhao Wang, Shilin He, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang, Bowen Li, Jiaheng Wen, Chengxing Xie, Maoquan Wang, Yufan Huang, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Yingnong Dang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies highlight that dependency-related issues cause over 40% of observed runtime errors on the generated repository. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark and evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLMs’ capability on dependency inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only a 48% execution pass rate on Python, indicating room for improvement. |
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP. |
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianwei Lin, Jiang Liu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yang Dai, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Wanggui He, Juncheng Li, Jiannan Guo, Hao Jiang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning are resource-efficient, but performance often falls short . a new approach, TeamLoRA, integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts to improve learning efficiency . teamLoRA integrates collaborative and competition modules to improve model learning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TeamLoRA improves performance in multi-task learning . teamLorea integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance . |
LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoshi Pan, Yu Li, Honglin Lin, Qizhi Pei, Zinan Tang, Wei Wu, Chenlin Ming, H. Vicky Zhao, Conghui He, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on improving the quality of correct training data, neglecting the value contained in error data, thereby hindering the model’s reflective ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve LLM's reasoning ability by learning from error data and a grounded mistake augmentation method to collect representative errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant performance improvements over other strong models with less than 90k data. |
Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that cross-language data expansion results in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection on English ACE corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ED performance by 1.6% over the straight data combination. |
Stronger, Lighter, Better: Towards Life-Long Attribute Value Extraction for E-Commerce Products (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for attribute value extraction struggle for parameter efficiency and reliability due to data contamination and catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple product type and attribute to promote de-contamination and parameter efficiency while scaling up. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with affordable parameter size, least historical knowledge forgetting, and greatest robustness against noises. |
CLiMP: A Benchmark for Chinese Language Model Evaluation (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Linguistically informed analyses of language models (LMs) contribute to understanding and improvement of such models. |
| Approach: | They introduce a corpus of Chinese linguistic minimal pairs (CLiMP) to investigate what knowledge Chinese LMs acquire. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus of Chinese linguistic minimal pairs (CLiMP) covers 9 major Chinese linguist phenomena. |
Can Large Language Models Understand Context? (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Zhu, Joel Moniz, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Site Li, Yuan Zhang, Hong Yu, Bo-Hsiang Tseng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) have been inadequate to evaluate their ability to understand contextual features. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess large language models' ability to understand context by adapting existing datasets to suit their evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better under the in-context learning pretraining scenario than state-of-the-art models. |
Distantly-Supervised Joint Extraction with Noise-Robust Learning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying entity pairs and relations with a single model are noisy . Existing methods only consider one source of noise or make decisions using external knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns entity mentions with corresponding tags for joint extraction . they propose DENRL, which employs a lightweight transformer backbone for joint tagging . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two benchmark datasets with better interpretability. |
Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on pairwise matching, ignoring robustness . current models exhibit frustrating degradation, with a maximum drop of 23.43 F1 score . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the evaluation of open information extraction models in the real world . they perform experiments on typical models published in the last decade and a representative large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is rated robust on a knowledge-invariant clique with different syntactic and expressive forms. |
MatRank: Text Re-ranking by Latent Preference Matrix (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text ranking have improved performance, but there are still challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns to re-rank the text retrieved for a given query by learning to predict the most relevant passage based on a latent preference matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on datasets with extensive results. |
LlamaCare: An Instruction Fine-Tuned Large Language Model for Clinical NLP (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable abilities in generating natural texts . applying LLMs to clinical domain still poses significant challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a method of instruction fine-tuning for adapting large language models to clinical domains . they generate instructions, inputs, and outputs covering a wide spectrum of clinical services . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline LLMs on clinical tasks . it requires domain adaptation, task-specific learning, and reliability . |
VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract entity pairs and their relations from labeled data are noisy and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrap learning approach that is motivated by intuition that the higher the uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and related methods on two large datasets. |
Better Highlighting: Creating Sub-Sentence Summary Highlights (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarizations are considered to be less reliable because they distort the original meaning and can be confusing for readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate summary highlights that are understandable on their own to avoid confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows summaries to be understood in context and avoids misdirecting readers to false conclusions. |
CB-Whisper: Contextual Biasing Whisper Using Open-Vocabulary Keyword-Spotting (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuang Li, Yinglu Li, Min Zhang, Chang Su, Jiawei Yu, Mengyao Piao, Xiaosong Qiao, Miaomiao Ma, Yanqing Zhao, Hao Yang
| Challenge: | End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems struggle to recognize rare name entities such as personal names, organizations and terminologies that are not frequently encountered in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a convolutional neural network-based ASR system that performs open-vocabulary keyword-spotting before the decoder to match the features between the entities and the utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves mixed-error-rate (MER) and entity recall compared to the original Whisper model on three internal datasets and two publicly available datasets. |
DPC: Training-Free Text-to-SQL Candidate Selection via Dual-Paradigm Consistency (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating SQL queries lack the ability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BIRD and Spider show that the proposed method outperforms baselines. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
Tell-and-Answer: Towards Explainable Visual Question Answering using Attributes and Captions (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual question answering represent images using pre-trained CNNs . but they rarely provide any insight, apart from the answer, into the VQA process . |
| Approach: | They propose to break up the end-to-end VQA into two steps: explaining and reasoning . they first extract attributes and generate descriptions as explanations for an image . a reasoning module utilizes these explanations in place of the image to infer an answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves comparable performance with baselines, but with added benefits of explanability and the ability to improve with higher quality explanations. |
ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to reduce resource requirements for task-specific large language models have been developed. |
| Approach: | They propose a delta compression approach that optimizes for importance of a model . they use SVD to dynamically adjust the sparsity ratios of different vectors based on their importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art in retaining task-specific knowledge even at high sparsity ratios. |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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 Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Linlin Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage. |
Explicit Semantic Decomposition for Definition Generation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing definition generation methods rely on decoding to extract semantic components of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly decomposes meaning of words into semantic components and models them with discrete latent variables for definition generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on WordNet and Oxford benchmarks. |
Locomo-Plus: Beyond-Factual Cognitive Memory Evaluation Framework for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols focus on surface-level factual recall. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for assessing cognitive memory under cue–trigger semantic disconnect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals failures not captured by existing benchmarks. |
Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Autoregressive modeling is a common method for processing language sequences and is effective in token prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens and a continuous tokenizer for speech compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS) this is attributed to better information preservation rate across low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. |
A Knowledge Plug-and-Play Test Bed for Open-domain Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge-based open-domain dialogue generation aims to build chit-chat systems that talk to humans using mined support knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multi-source dialogue knowledge selection and response generation using Wikipedia's wizard of Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is called multi-source Wizard of Wikipedia (Ms.WoW) it contains clean support knowledge, grounded at the utterance level and partitioned into multiple knowledge sources. |
Eliciting Implicit Acoustic Styles from Open-domain Instructions to Facilitate Fine-grained Controllable Generation of Speech (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current work relies on pre-defined rules or templates to control the style of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-domain instructions to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on their instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on open-domain instructions. |
Exploring the Cognitive Knowledge Structure of Large Language Models: An Educational Diagnostic Assessment Approach (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs evaluation with exams are lacking in cognitive research on their overall knowledge structure. |
| Approach: | They conduct an evaluation using a human test dataset based on Bloom Taxonomy to reveal the knowledge structures of Large Language Models and gain insights of their cognitive capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can pass AP, SAT, and Leetcode exams, but lacks the cognitive power to perform on human exams. |
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yaozhen Liang, Xiao Liu, Jiajun Yu, Zhouhua Fang, Qunsheng Zou, Linghan Zheng, Yong Li, Zhiwei Liu, Haishuai Wang
| Challenge: | Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors. |
A Unified Framework for Modeling Heterogeneous Financial Data via Dual-Granularity Prompting (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent industrial credit scoring models rely heavily on manually tuned statistical learning methods due to the complexity of heterogeneous financial data and the challenge of modeling evolving creditworthiness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates credit scoring as a multi-scale sequential learning problem. |
| Outcome: | FinLangNet improves KS and bad debt rate by 6.3 pp in real world deployments. |
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing training data is sparse, with each document associated with one or a few labeled queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free potential query retrieval framework to address this problem . they use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture comprehensive semantic information from a document with multiple queries. |
Exploring Mathematical Extrapolation of Large Language Models with Synthetic Data (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent capabilities in language understanding, text generation and many other tasks, but struggle in complex multi-step reasoning problems such as mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune an open-llama-3B model to perform well on multi-step reasoning tasks via synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach a zero-shot pass@1 at 0.44 on the in-domain dataset and demonstrates certain generalization capabilities on the out-of-domain data. |
Reason in Chains, Learn in Trees: Self-Rectification and Grafting for Multi-turn Agent Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning for Large Language Models treat trajectories as independent chains and ignore critical steps that may disproportionally impact reasoning outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories by identifying and merging functionally similar steps/nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories. |
A Deep Relevance Model for Zero-Shot Document Filtering (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document classification do not consider document filtering . existing methods do not include document filter. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep relevance model for zero-shot document filtering called DAZER . they use word embeddings to extract the relevance signals from word embeds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two document collections . it estimates the relevance between a document and a category by using seed words . |
ProgGen: Generating Named Entity Recognition Datasets Step-by-step with Self-Reflexive Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable adaptability across domains, but they are often not suitable for structured knowledge extraction tasks such as named entity recognition (NER). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that instructs LLMs to self-reflect on the specific domain and generates domain-relevant attributes for creating attribute-rich training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces NER datasets in domains with domain-relevant attributes and generates entity terms and NER context data around these entities. |
Fast and Accurate End-to-End Span-based Semantic Role Labeling as Word-based Graph Parsing (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using end-to-end span-based SRL, we propose a word-based graph parsing task for word-level representation of spans . compared with word-driven SRL, span-Based SRL is more complex due to difficulties in determining argument boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to cast end-to-end span-based SRL as a word-based graph parsing task . they propose a constrained Viterbi procedure to ensure the legality of the output graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can parse 669/252 sentences per second without and with pre-trained models. |
OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Chuang Liu, Linhao Yu, Jiaxuan Li, Renren Jin, Yufei Huang, Ling Shi, Junhui Zhang, Xinmeng Ji, Tingting Cui, Liutao Liutao, Jinwang Song, Hongying Zan, Sun Li, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
SEP-MLDC: A Simple and Effective Paradigm for Multi-Label Document Classification (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-label document classification paradigm that utilizes large language models to expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
Generating Sentences from Disentangled Syntactic and Semantic Spaces (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are widely used in natural language generation due to the regularization of the latent space. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate sentences from disentangled syntactic and semantic spaces by using the linearized tree sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves similar or better performance in various tasks compared with state-of-the-art models. |
Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend . user information needs are often underspecified, and the nature of heterogeneous documents poses challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations . their dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research. |
Don’t Stop Early: Scalable Enterprise Deep Research with Controlled Information Flow and Evidence-Aware Termination (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jiaxin Zhang, Vaibhav Vats, Yu Li, Xiangyu Peng, Chien-Sheng Wu
| Challenge: | Enterprise deep research systems fail to produce decision-ready reports due to uneven information coverage, context explosion, and premature stopping. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable Enterprise Deep Research (EDR) architecture that decomposes requests into coverage-driven objectives via outline generation with reflection and localizes context with dependency-guided execution and explicit information sharing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the strongest overall performance compared with competitive deep-research baselines on internal sales enablement tasks and the public DeepResearch Bench benchmark. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
ResoFilter: Fine-grained Synthetic Data Filtering for Large Language Models through Data-Parameter Resonance Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models lack clear metrics for evaluating data characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates models, data, and tasks to refine datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to full-scale fine-tuning using only half the data in mathematical tasks and exhibits strong generalization across different models and domains. |
FLiText: A Faster and Lighter Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Convolution Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | obtaining large amounts of labeled data is expensive. |
| Approach: | They develop a semi-supervised learning framework called FLiText which improves text classification accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy of lightweight models on IMDb, Yelp-5, and Yahoo! Answer . the framework improve accuracy by 6.59%, 3.94%, and 3.22% on the datasets of IMDa, Yep-5 and Yahoo. Answer compared with the fully supervised method on the full dataset . |
Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion and Key Attribute Tree Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA EM models on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets. |
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jianxiang Yu, Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to review scientific papers are limited by their content or quality . SEA is a framework for automated scientific review, but its contents are generic or partial. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated scientific review using large language models . they propose to use a standardized review dataset to fine-tune an LLM to generate high-quality reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate high-quality reviews from standardized datasets and improves on the existing feedback mechanisms. |
Safety Alignment in NLP Tasks: Weakly Aligned Summarization as an In-Context Attack (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent developments in balancing usefulness and safety of large language models raise a critical question . current attacks, especially adversarial ones that manipulate malicious prompts, often aim to manipulate the input . |
| Approach: | They show that LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight a vulnerability in LLMs that can't translate or summarize documents . the study focuses on LLM models, Gemini and GPT-4, which can' be exploited . |
Why Does New Knowledge Create Messy Ripple Effects in LLMs? (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GradSim indicator to detect when and why updated knowledge ripples in language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed indicator GradSim shows that LMs that fail to handle ripple effects have low GradSIM. |
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Yankai Chen, Chunyu Miao, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Hanrong Zhang, Fangxin Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Langzhou He, Yangning Li, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
Self-Improvement of Non-autoregressive Model via Sequence-Level Distillation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive Transformers (NAT) models generate the entire sequence in parallel, but the multimodality problem limits their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate distilled data by the NAT model itself, eliminating the need for additional teacher networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate distilled data by the NAT model without teacher networks and adapt to different NAT models without precise adjustments. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
An Embarrassingly Easy but Strong Baseline for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to detect and classify entity spans in text. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Convolutional Neural Network to model spatial relations in NER . they use three commonly used nested NER datasets to compare their results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several proposed methods with the same pre-trained encoders in three nested NER datasets. |
TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haofei Yu, Keyang Xuan, Fenghai Li, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Existing research systems often design and use agentic workflows to perform research tasks such as ideation, scientific coding, review writing, and tree-based search. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. |
DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.x. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.k. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan, Zhifang Sui, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures face challenges in ensuring expert specialization . despite the promising performance, scaling language models to an extremely large scale is associated with exceedingly high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for ultimate expert specialization by segmenting experts into mN ones and activating mK from them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable performance with GShard with 2B parameters and computation. |
Transfer-Aware Data Selection for Domain Adaptation in Text Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve domain adaptation do not guarantee improved adaptability, but may negatively impact model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can effectively improve model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
TASA: Deceiving Question Answering Models by Twin Answer Sentences Attack (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial models rely on keyword matching and ignore relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use keyword matching to attack model with two biases that rely on a perturbed answer sentence and a distracting answer sentence to misguide model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. |
Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data annotation use an aggressive approach prompting LLMs to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. |
| Approach: | They propose a teacher-student framework that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM) they propose to use LLMs to generate and distill candidate annotation with slms to ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods due to uncertainty in LLMs and is noisetolerant. |
HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing static compression methods suffer from coarse-grained caching and high I/O overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free dynamic compression framework that uses a sparse attention mechanism to categorize attention heads based on stability and similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to 3 compared to the original model with a 224K context. |
Gradient-guided Attention Map Editing: Towards Efficient Contextual Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience “contextual hallucination” where they prioritize self-generated content over input context, leading to a disregard for pertinent details. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically adjusts attention maps to enhance contextual relevance by using a trained classifier to identify attention maps likely to induce hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucinations across open-source models on summarization and open-book QA tasks. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
CrossQG: Improving Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Consistency Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate questions with controlled difficulty, but they often fail to align with the given target difficulty. |
| Approach: | They propose a question generation method that requires no tuning of generator parameters yet significantly improves difficulty consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several mainstream methods on high-quality question answering datasets and achieves superior consistency with target difficulty. |
Generating Long-form Story Using Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Active Sentence Learning by Adversarial Uncertainty Sampling in Discrete Space (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing uncertainty sampling methods are time-consuming and can't be executed frequently. |
| Approach: | They propose adversarial uncertainty sampling in discrete space to find informative unlabeled text samples for annotation using adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on effectiveness on five datasets. |
Judge as A Judge: Improving the Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Judge-Consistency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuliang Liu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Cheng Yang, Zheni Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ge Yu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics cannot fairly evaluate the outputs of RAG models during training and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which prompts LLMs to generate different judgments based on various combinations of judgment dimensions and utilizes the judge-consistency to evaluate these judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate evaluations for RAG models across different RAG model and datasets. |
Why Multimodal In-Context Learning Lags Behind? Unveiling the Inner Mechanisms and Bottlenecks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) enables models to adapt to new tasks via inference-time demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple inference-stage enhancement method that reinforces task mapping transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method strengthens task mapping transfer in multimodal models . it performs comparable to text-only ICL in zero-shot settings but degrades significantly under few-shot demonstrations. |
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2017): a dataset for cross-domain semantic parsing in context with 4,298 question sequences. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it has greater semantic diversity and can be generalized to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseened databases at test time. |
Incorporating Global Information in Local Attention for Knowledge Representation Learning (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are a promising model that takes advantage of localized attention mechanism to perform knowledge representation learning (KRL) on graph-structure data. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate global information into the GAT family of models by using an attention-based global random walk algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results on KG entity prediction against the state-of-the-arts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
SRF: Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with a Novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction ignore bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module for relation prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance and the proposed method is effective and general when integrated into existing models. |
DcLM: Output Length Control of Large Language Models via Dynamic Length Markers (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have limited awareness of output length, making it difficult to satisfy precise length requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach that introduces dynamic length markers to guide length-controllable outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces length deviation across multiple datasets. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
From What to Why: Improving Relation Extraction with Rationale Graph (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural relation extraction models are limited by entity type and textual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAtionale Graph to organize co-occurrence constraints among entity types, triggers and relations in a holistic graph view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines significantly and achieves state-of-the-art performance on document-level and sentence-level RE benchmarks. |
TabularMath: Understanding Math Reasoning over Tables with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms math word problems into scalable tabular reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. |
Rethinking Jailbreak Detection of Large Vision Language Models with Representational Contrastive Scoring (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to a growing array of multimodal jailbreak attacks, necessitating a generalizable defense that is efficient for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a lightweight projection to separate benign and malicious inputs in safety-critical layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a simple yet powerful contrastive score that differentiates true malicious intent from mere distribution shift. |
SEAD: A Surrogate-free Label-only Membership Inference Attack against Pre-trained LLMs with Semantic-Aware Density (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing membership inference attacks require access to complete logits, but such access is often unavailable in real-world deployments where only the generated text is exposed. |
| Approach: | They propose a surrogate-free label-only MIA approach that directly estimates token probabilities through Monte Carlo sampling of the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing label-only attacks and serves as a foundational density estimator in the label-exclusive setting. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
AlgBench: To What Extent Do Large Reasoning Models Understand Algorithms? (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning fail to answer a critical question: do LRMs master algorithmic thinking? Empirical evaluations on leading LRM models reveal substantial performance heterogeneity, while models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm-centric benchmark that evaluates large reasoning models under an algorithmic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs reveal substantial performance heterogeneity . models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% . |
DuReadervis: A Chinese Dataset for Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task that requires answering questions based on a collection of document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use document images to answer questions using layouts and visual features instead of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human cost and improves scalability of QA systems by incorporating layouts and visual features. |
The Pragmatic Mind of Machines: Tracing the Emergence of Pragmatic Competence in Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution and theory-of-mind reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce a dataset grounded in the pragmatic concept of alternatives to evaluate whether large language models can accurately infer nuanced speaker intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can infer nuanced speaker intentions by inferring the speaker’s intended meaning and explaining when and why a speaker would choose one utterance over its alternative. |
Tree of Agents: Improving Long-Context Capabilities of Large Language Models through Multi-Perspective Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models face persistent challenges when handling long-context tasks . existing methods that reduce input have the risk of discarding key information . |
| Approach: | To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent reasoning framework called Tree of Agents . the framework segments input into chunks processed by independent agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on long-context tasks. |
Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on structured tasks, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models up to 10x their size and can be scalable and effective. |
Developing and Utilizing a Large-Scale Cantonese Dataset for Multi-Tasking in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiyue Jiang, Alfred Kar Yin Truong, Yanyu Chen, Qinghang Bao, Sheng Wang, Pengan Chen, Jiuming Wang, Lingpeng Kong, Yu Li, Chuan Wu
| Challenge: | Cantonese is considered a low-resource language due to the dominance of Mandarin . rich colloquial vocabulary of Cantone, English loanwords, and code-switching characteristics add to the complexity of corpus collection and processing. |
| Approach: | We collect Cantonese texts from open source corpora, Hong Kong-specific forums, Wikipedia . we refine the model through supervised fine-tuning on curated Cantonesian tasks . |
| Outcome: | The model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four Cantonese benchmarks. |
HGCN4MeSH: Hybrid Graph Convolution Network for MeSH Indexing (2020.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent deep learning methods for MeSH indexing fail to capture complex correlations between terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to learn the relationship between MeSH terms using Graph Convolution Network (GCN) they use two biGRUs to learn embedding representations of abstract and title of MeSH index text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is competitive with the state-of-the-art models on two datasets. |
Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yingxiu Zhao, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongkyu Lee, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn languages only focus on supervised learning, and unlabeled data is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised lifelong language learning setting where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various language tasks and is effective and superior to existing models. |
AdaDHP: Fine-Grained Fine-Tuning via Dual Hadamard Product and Adaptive Parameter Selection (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Increasing number of parameters can be challenging under resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method with fewer parameters and finer granularity that can adaptively select important parameters for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can fine-tune important parameters for each task, while maintaining the same weights. |
DICE: Structured Reasoning in LLMs through SLM-Guided Chain-of-Thought Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often prioritize reasoning over adherence to detailed instructions due to high computational costs and limited parameter access. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that guides small language models to refine LLMs’ outputs through chain-of-thought correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the average format accuracy and content correctness of LLM outputs by 35.4% and 29.4%, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance over other competitive baselines. |
PopALM: Popularity-Aligned Language Models for Social Media Trendy Response Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work focuses on generic human responses without considering popularity factors in the social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose Popularity-Aligned Language Models to distinguish responses liked by a larger audience through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish responses liked by a larger audience through reinforcement learning. |
Generative Music Models’ Alignment with Professional and Amateur Users’ Expectations (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in text-to-music generation using large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to align AI-generated music with human expressions . they use a dataset of over 1.5 million songs to analyze their content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and facilitates end-to-end generation of songs audio. |
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yangyang Zhong, Yanmei Gu, Zhengqing Zang, Xiaomeng Li, Yuqi Ding, Xibei Jia, Yuting Shen, Zhenzhong Lan, Liwang Zhu, Weiping Liu, Junlin Zhou, Haisheng Liu, Zhong Xin Yu, Pengxin Luo, Donglian Qi, Yunfeng Yan, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding. |
| Approach: | They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss. |
Inflate and Shrink:Enriching and Reducing Interactions for Fast Text-Image Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that late-interaction methods trade off retrieval accuracy and efficiency by exploiting cross-modal interactions only in the late stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an inflating and shrinking approach to exploit cross-modal interactions . they inflate code inputs and shrink code outputs to exploit interactions progressively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits cross-modal interactions in the late stage to achieve retrieval speed. |
Experience is the Teacher: Reusing Atomic Thoughts from LLMs to Improve Medical Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guangya Yu, Hui Luo, Qi Ye, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Mingxi Shang, Xuanwu Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent large reasoning models (LLMs) lack dynamic and diverse thinking capabilities . reusing atomic thoughts provides a practical pathway toward dynamic reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
Retrieve & Memorize: Dialog Policy Learning with Multi-Action Memory (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a rapid growth of interest in building task-oriented dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieve-and-memorize framework to deal with unbalanced distribution of system actions in dialogue datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance among state-of-the-art models on a large-scale task-oriented dialogue dataset. |
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation. |
MPTc-Bench: Measuring Cross-market Generative Ability of Vision-Language Models via Movie Poster Transcreation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work adapts textual transcreation to image editing and formulates image transcreations to better match a target audience while preserving meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage planner-editor pipeline in which an VLM planner specifies executable edits and an image editor renders them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can transcreate a visual asset for a different market while preserving its identity while matching market-specific design preferences and multilingual typography. |
FLAG-TRADER: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guojun Xiong, Zhiyang Deng, Keyi Wang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xueqing Peng, Mingquan Lin, Kaleb E Smith, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive reasoning capabilities in financial tasks, but struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large language models with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in trading and other financial domain tasks. |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haiyang Yu, Yuchuan Wu, Fan Shi, Jinghui Lu, Ke Niu, Xiaodong Ge, Minghan Zhuo, Jingqun Tang, Bin Li
| Challenge: | Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese . current vision-language models struggle with visual complexity and poor adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Chinese ancient documents' visual/linguistic complexity . ancient documents are valuable cultural heritage, but they face challenges in digitization and understanding . |
| Outcome: | the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents evaluates VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning . ancient documents carry thousands of years of Chinese history and culture . traditional methods only scan images, while current models struggle with visual complexity . |
A Dual-Perspective NLG Meta-Evaluation Framework with Automatic Benchmark and Better Interpretability (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
TCSinger: Zero-Shot Singing Voice Synthesis with Style Transfer and Multi-Level Style Control (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to generate singing voices rich in stylistic nuances for unseen singers due to multifaceted nature of singing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot SVS model for style transfer across cross-lingual speech and singing styles and multi-level style control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TCSinger outperforms baseline models in synthesis quality, singer similarity, and style controllability. |
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for controllable text generation are guided by coarse-grained feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning algorithm which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance on single-attribute and multi-attract control tasks. |
Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zhiyuan Liu, Minghe Yu, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines. |
SEE: Continual Fine-tuning with Sequential Ensemble of Experts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Continual fine-tuning of large language models suffers from catastrophic forgetting . some approaches use routers to assign tasks to experts, but continual learning often requires retraining . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates routing and response mechanisms within each expert . it eliminates the need for an additional router and allows each expert to decide whether a query should be handled . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous approaches in continual fine-tuning . it can handle learning tasks and out-of-distribution instances, paving the way for distributed model ensembling. |
KoRC: Knowledge Oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep text understanding have encountered two major limitations . most require human annotation of knowledge, which leads to limited knowledge coverage . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to help readers understand a document with prior knowledge . they use massive knowledge bases to guide annotators and large language models to construct knowledgable questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks have limited knowledge coverage and use choices or spans as answers, which results in narrow answer space. |
FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang, Qiming Xu, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods in evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. |
| Approach: | They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. |
Prompt-Guided Internal States for Hallucination Detection of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate incorrect or logically incorrect responses, which is known as LLM hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for supervised hallucination detection using in-domain data by prompting changes to the structure related to text truthfulness in LLMs’ internal states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the cross-domain generalization of existing hallucination detection methods. |
Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems’ Quality with Context-Aware Item Meta-Information (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate the recommendation function and dialog generation function smoothly are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate dialog context for recommendation and dialog generation better using a pre-trained language model and an item metadata encoder to integrate the recommendation and dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves the integration of recommendation and dialog generation functions. |
Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yunhao Gou, Hansi Yang, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Yihan Zeng, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qun Liu, Bo Han, James Kwok, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) aims to enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but its effectiveness is often compromised by corrupted datasets with issues such as hallucinated content and poor OCR quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a corruption-robust training paradigm that surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
Using a Penalty-based Loss Re-estimation Method to Improve Implicit Discourse Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | inessential words are unintentionally misjudged as attention-worthy words and assigned heavier attention weights than should be. |
| Approach: | They propose a penalty-based method to regulate the attention learning process by integrating penalty coefficients into the computation of loss by means of overstability of attention weight distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the Penn Discourse TreeBank corpus and is competitive compared to the state-of-the-art methods. |
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiming Zeng, Jinghan Cao, Zexin Li, Wanhao Yu, Zhankai Ye, Dawei Xiang, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao, Tingting Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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% . |
Editing the Moving World: Model Editing for Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai, Xi Chen, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge editing focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for modeling large language models using six representative models . they analyze the strengths and limitations of existing models and identify new directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark extends existing models from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
Improving Question Generation with Multi-level Content Planning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest key phrase selection is essential for question generation, yet it is difficult to connect disjointed phrases into meaningful questions, especially for long context. |
| Approach: | They propose a QG framework that uses multi-level content planning to generate questions from a given context and an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two popular QG datasets. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
Multi-LLM Collaborative Search for Complex Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to the vast reasoning space inherent in the complexity and inherent ambiguities of natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-search-agents paradigm that integrates diverse reasoning pathways by combining independent exploration and iterative refinement among multiple LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance over single-agent and multi-agend baselines in complex mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies in text-to-SQL do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax tree network to address the complex text-to-SQL generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model by 9.5% on a large text-to-SQL corpus. |
Mitigate Position Bias in LLMs via Scaling a Single Hidden States Channel (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yijiong Yu, Huiqiang Jiang, Xufang Luo, Qianhui Wu, Chin-Yew Lin, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang, Yongfeng Huang, Lili Qiu
| Challenge: | Long-context language models exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the middle" research shows that even long-contemporary LLMs fail to utilize all context information effectively . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling positional hidden states . they propose to use a channel of hidden states to modify positional Hidden states a LCLM's positional bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance by 15.2% in a "lost in the middle" benchmark. |
Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for Low Resource Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang, Nayu Liu, Guoxin Yu, Zihao Li, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, Ping Luo, Yue Yu
| Challenge: | Existing routing methods rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves matching accuracy while lowering inference costs . it decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements . |
Teaching According to Talents! Instruction Tuning LLMs with Competence-Aware Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Yankai Chen, Wei-Chieh Huang, Wenhao Jiang, Hui Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. |
| Approach: | a framework for efficient instruction tuning is proposed to address the issue of curriculum rigidity . current methods rely on static heuristic difficulty metrics and fail to adapt to evolving capabilities . |
| Outcome: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models . current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed learning trajectory . |
Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Persuasion dialogue systems have long-standing problems of dialogue repetition and inconsistency which could impact user experience and impede the persuaded outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine a language model baseline without user simulators and distill sentence-level information about repetition, inconsistency, and task relevance through rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on automatic metrics and human evaluation results on a donation persuasion task and generates more diverse, consistent and persuasive conversations according to user feedback. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
Uncertainty in Language Models: Assessment through Rank-Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xinmeng Huang, Shuo Li, Mengxin Yu, Matteo Sesia, Hamed Hassani, Insup Lee, Osbert Bastani, Edgar Dobriban
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation . however, it is crucial to correctly quantify their level of uncertainty in responding to inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify uncertainty and confidence for Large Language Models . they use a Rank-calibration framework to measure uncertainty and confident responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses uncertainty and confidence measures for LMs. |
Semantic Relation-aware Difference Representation Learning for Change Captioning (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to describe semantic change in images with distractors are difficult to learn . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic relation-aware difference representation learning network to explicitly learn the difference representation in the existence of distractors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-Change and Spot-the -Diff datasets. |
ThinkAnswer Loss: Balancing Semantic Similarity and Exact Matching for LLM Reasoning Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer. |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Why LLMs Hallucinate on Structured Knowledge: A Mechanistic Analysis of Reasoning over Linearized Representations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shanghao Li, Jinda Han, Yibo Wang, Yuanjie Zhu, Zihe Song, Langzhou He, Kenan Kamel A Alghythee, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing literature primarily addresses this problem through external interventions such as retrieval augmentation and prompt engineering at the input or output level. |
| Approach: | They find that LLMs can still produce hallucinated outputs when using structured external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models fail to ground the provided knowledge, causing the model to revert to parametric memory. |
INVESTORBENCH: A Benchmark for Financial Decision-Making Tasks with LLM-based Agent (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haohang Li, Yupeng Cao, Yangyang Yu, Shashidhar Reddy Javaji, Zhiyang Deng, Yueru He, Yuechen Jiang, Zining Zhu, K.p. Subbalakshmi, Jimin Huang, Lingfei Qian, Xueqing Peng, Jordan W. Suchow, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Recent advances have underscored the potential of large language model (LLM)-based agents in financial decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents using 13 different LLMs as backbone models across various market environments and tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of 13 different LLMs across various market environments and tasks. |
CoTEvol: Self-Evolving Chain-of-Thoughts for Data Synthesis in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity with markedly improved efficiency. |
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept expansion in MOOCs are inefficient because of the diversity of MOOC courses and rapid updates. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs that employs a two-level mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on nine real MOOC datasets and maintains competitive performance under different settings. |
VQAGuider: Guiding Multimodal Large Language Models to Answer Complex Video Questions (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can grasp the intention of a question and decomposing it to a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer with the help of an agent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal large language models to grasp the intention of a question and decompose it into a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of complex video-related questions by 29.6% and 17.2% on CVQA and the existing VQA datasets. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that belong to particular categories, such as person, location, organization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates named entity’s type information into BERT by an adapter layer and integrates it into a gazetteer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in multiple corpus. |
Winnowing Knowledge for Multi-choice Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from noises in retrieved knowledge . encoding methods that use commonsense knowledge are less effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which conducts interception and soft filtering to reduce noise . they use commonsense knowledge from Wikipedia and ConceptNet to encode questions and options . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on commonsense question answering tasks compared to baselines . it is able to conduct interception and soft filtering to shield the encoder from noise . |
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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%. |
CDT: A Comprehensive Capability Framework for Large Language Models Across Cognition, Domain, and Task (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated abilities, lacking a holistic framework for assessing LLM capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognition-Domain-Task framework which measures a model’s capabilities across three dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on dataset evaluation and data selection, while achieving higher scores on general and specific benchmarks. |
AutoPKG: An Automated Framework for Dynamic E-commerce Product-Attribute Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang, Zhichao Wan, Yi Gao, Yuanming Li, Lin Gui, Wenhao Sun, Cheng Yu
| Challenge: | Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model framework that constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph from multimodal product content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 0.953 WKE for product types, 0.724 WKEs for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization on a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba). |
Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Vision-Language Models Mistake Head Orientation for Gaze Direction: Nonverbal Conversation Cues (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zory Zhang, Pinyuan Feng, Bingyang Wang, Tianwei Zhao, Suyang Yu, Qingying Gao, Hokin Deng, Ziqiao Ma, Yijiang Li, Dezhi Luo
| Challenge: | Where someone looks is a nonverbal communication cue that children and adults readily use. |
| Approach: | They used 1,360 real-world photos to construct evaluation stimuli for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they found a substantial performance gap between VLMs and humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting gaze direction using head orientation rather than eye appearance. |
How Far Can In-Context Alignment Go? Exploring the State of In-Context Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICA) can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences without requiring parameter adjustments. |
| Approach: | They investigate the effectiveness of each part in enabling ICA to function effectively and examine how variants in these parts impact alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can comprehend human instructions without parameter adjustments. |
MADS: Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation for Diverse Persuasion Data Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLM-based agents exhibit superior moral and emotional language performance compared to humans, raising expectations for their deployment in persuasive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating persuasive multi-turn dialogues via agent self-play using user agents designed to simulate diverse persona-driven behaviors, a Dialog Agent executing task-oriented persuasion strategies and an Optimization Agent evaluating and refining dialogue outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improved the persuasion capacity of small LLMs, increasing the organic traffic conversion rate by 22.4% (from 1.83% to 2.24%) . |
LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional translation capabilities in high-resource language tasks, yet their effectiveness in low-resourced languages is suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive multilingual continual pre-training on the LLaMA series models and develop LLiMAX for translation support across more than 100 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher translation performance than existing open-source models and performs on-par with specialized translation model on the Flores-101 benchmark. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
When Generative Adversarial Networks Meet Sequence Labeling Challenges (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for sequence labeling use a feature extractor and sequence tagger . a recent study shows that SLGAN is versatile and highly effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks to address sequence labeling challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong adaptability to various sequence labeling tasks. |
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize Chain-of-X methods by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks, and then categorise them by taxanomies and discuss potential future directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorised by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. |
Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs fail to capture the nuances of human emotions, making their interactions seem impersonal or inadequate. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage automatic data generation framework to generate a Chinese dataset called CAPE . their data is a cognitive appraisal theory-based Emotional corpus that accounts for personal and situational factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate human-like responses in conversation with large language models. |
Detecting Health Advice in Medical Research Literature (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Health and medical researchers often give clinical and policy recommendations to inform health practice and public health policy. |
| Approach: | They developed a BERT-based prediction model that can predict whether a sentence gives strong advice, weak advice, or not. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict whether a sentence gives strong advice, weak advice, or not with a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.93. |
CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Longxuan Yu, Delin Chen, Siheng Xiong, Qingyang Wu, Dawei Li, Zhikai Chen, Xiaoze Liu, Liangming Pan
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks. |
Semantic-Aware Logical Reasoning via a Semiotic Framework (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Wenbing Li, Junqing Yu, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, Wei Yang, Zikai Song
| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook the interplay between logical complexity and semantic complexity, limiting their robustness under abstract propositions, ambiguous contexts, and conflicting stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a semiotic-square-guided framework that integrates automated deduction with reflective verification to manage logical complexity across deeper reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on RepublicQA with 6.25% average gain, and generalizes well to four mainstream logical reasoning benchmarks with an additional 7.05% improvement. |
Unified Language Representation for Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer complex questions are limited to text or structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that transforms images and tables into unified language representations to simplify QA problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two datasets and the WebQA leaderboard. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
MultiSQL: A Schema-Integrated Context-Dependent Text2SQL Dataset with Diverse SQL Operations (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text2SQL is a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task enables users to convert natural language into SQL statements. |
An Entropy-based Text Watermarking Detection Method (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) are effective in identifying machine-generated texts, but they are not effective in low-entropy scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-based text watermarking detection method that takes into account the influence of token entropy to better reflect the degree of watermark detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is training-free and fully automated. |
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
CogNet-KG: Empowering Tutoring Dialogues with a Cognitively-Structured Knowledge Graph for STEM Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Educational knowledge graphs are a critical component of intelligent tutoring systems that are structured around cognitive principles and provide support for interactive teaching. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitively-structured large-scale knowledge graph for STEM learning that models nearly 500 core concepts across five subjects with various cognitively grounded relations corresponding to specific learning objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates a high-quality tutoring dialogue dataset CogDialogue-QA and a specialized tutorial LLM that internalizes this structured pedagogical reasoning. |
Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks treat memory as a static append-only archive . Existing systems focus on passive accumulation, resulting in a 'passive accumulation' of memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for experience-driven agent evolution that integrates procedural memory with contextual information to create a high-quality experience pool. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld show that ReMe outperforms memoryless Qwen3-8B. |
Decoding LLM Personality Measurement: Forced-Choice vs. Likert (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on investigating the psychological characteristics of Large Language Models (LLMs), emphasizing the importance of comprehending their behavioral traits. |
| Approach: | They evaluated six Large Language Models: Llama-3.1-8B, GLM-4-9B, Claude-3.5-sonnet, and Deepseek-V3 and used the forced-choice test to assess their personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The forced-choice test is more reliable and more accurate than the likert scale and forced-CHOICE test results for LLMs' Big Five personality scores. |
Pruning Weights but Not Truth: Safeguarding Truthfulness While Pruning LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural network pruning disrupts LLMs’ internal activation features crucial for lie detection . layer-wise pruning sparsity inadvertently removes crucial weights, failing to improve lie detection performance despite its reliance on the most crucial LLM layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning approach that places greater emphasis on layers with more activation outliers and stronger discriminative features simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the hallucination detection for pruned LLMs (achieving 88% accuracy at 50% sparsity) and enhances their performance on TruthfulQA. |
Dataset and Enhanced Model for Eligibility Criteria-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Clinical trials require that patients meet eligibility criteria to ensure safety and effectiveness of studies. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that includes the first-of-its-kind eligibility-criteria corpus and queries for criteria-to-sql . they propose 'neuro semantic parser' which can translate eligibility criteria to executable SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms existing state-of-the-art general-purpose models while highlighting the challenges presented by the new dataset. |
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianshu Yu, Chao Xiang, Mingchuan Yang, Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Cunxiang Wang, Jiale Cheng, Li Zhang, Xinyu Mu, Chuxiong Sun, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
Internalizing Multi-Agent Reasoning for Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping recommender systems by leveraging extensive world knowledge and semantic reasoning to interpret user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-agent Trajectory-Aligned Recommender to integrate reasoning capabilities into a model by a multi-agend teacher system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses its teacher by 8.7% to 39.5% while eliminating iterative latency. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Augmenting Operations Research with Auto-Formulation of Optimization Models From Problem Descriptions (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Rindra Ramamonjison, Haley Li, Timothy Yu, Shiqi He, Vishnu Rengan, Amin Banitalebi-dehkordi, Zirui Zhou, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems for operations research use NLP to suggest formulations of optimization problems. |
| Approach: | They propose an augmented intelligence system that can be used to simplify and enhance the modeling experience for operations research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system validates and edits the proposed formulations with a dataset of linear programming problems drawn from various application domains. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse natural language queries are limited by lack of labeled data and constrained decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm that makes full use of data through a dual-learning game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on overnight dataset. |
CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guangya Yu, Yanhao Li, Zongying Jiang, Yuxiong Jin, Li Dai, Yupian Lin, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Yongqi Fan, Qi Ye, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese electronic medical records-based dataset for MQCIC and propose CF-IR method that disentangles clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is a technique for adapting large-scale pretrained language models for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition a frozen pretrained language model with soft prompts from data . they propose to use a domain adaptation technique to regularize the decision boundary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms full-model tuning in data-scarce settings by a large margin. |
START: Self-taught Reasoner with Tools (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chengpeng Li, Mingfeng Xue, Zhenru Zhang, Jiaxi Yang, Beichen Zhang, Bowen Yu, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin, Xiang Wang, Dayiheng Liu
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through long chain-of-thought, yet they struggle with precise computations and algorithmic operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that activates LRMs’ latent tool-use capabilities through artificial hints and a framework that enables models to learn effective tool utilization through diverse hint patterns and rejection-based data synthesis. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that START significantly improves state-of-the-art LRMs across challenging benchmarks, including competition-level mathematics (AMC23: 95.0%, AIME24: 75.6%) and graduate-level science questions (GPQA: 64.6%). |
HIT: Nested Named Entity Recognition via Head-Tail Pair and Token Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing due to the nature of the named entity. |
| Approach: | They propose a nested NER model that leverages two key properties pertaining to the named entity, including explicit boundary tokens and tight internal connection between tokens within the boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three public NER datasets. |
Self Question-answering: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis by Role Flipped Machine Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to couple aspect terms with their corresponding opinion terms, which might make it easier to predict sentiment polarities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to pair aspect terms with their corresponding opinion terms . they propose to use a machine learning paradigm to solve the unified ABSA task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can solve the ABSA task without any additional data annotation or transformation. |
Distilling the Essence, Discarding the Dross: Improving Fairness in Multimodal Large Language Models via Historical Reflection-Guided Prompt Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Continual Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation via Dual Importance-based Model Division (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting by making compromises between the original and new language pairs, leading to sub-optimal performance on both translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual importance-based model division method to divide the model parameters into two parts and separate the translation of the original and new tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines under different incremental translation scenarios. |
Teaching Small Language Models Reasoning through Counterfactual Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual distillation framework that leverages LLMs to generate high-quality counterfacts and utilizes multi-view CoT to enhance the diversity of reasoning samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances reasoning capabilities of large language models and is more robust to OOD data. |
Enhancing Chinese Pre-trained Language Model via Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained Chinese language models ignore linguistics knowledge to learn representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-free enhancement module to integrate linguistics knowledge into Chinese pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Chinese pre-trained language models on 6 tasks with 10 benchmark datasets. |
Explainable Quantum Program Repair with Verifiable Proof Traces (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair provide only post-hoc, non-verifiable explanations that are not executable or verifiably. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples repair generation with machine-checkable executable explanations for quantum programs where correctness hinges on subtle semantic properties such as circuit equivalence and fidelity preservation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on QASMBench with mutation-generated quantum program bugs show that the proposed framework improves both semantic precision and explanation faithfulness over baselines that rely on unconstrained or purely natural-language explanations. |
Summary Factual Inconsistency Detection Based on LLMs Enhanced by Universal Information Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large language models can detect factual inconsistencies in summaries but they lack the efficiency and explainability needed to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple LLMs’ information extraction and reasoning capabilities to address key challenges and propose a framework for UIEFID to guide fine-tuned LLM methods in extracting unified structured information from documents and summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the detection accuracy and reduces redundant reasoning on the AGGREFACT benchmark. |
Interactive Key-Value Memory-augmented Attention for Image Paragraph Captioning (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image paragraph captioning ignore the past alignment information, resulting in repetitive captioning and incomplete captioning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Interactive key-value Memory-augmented Attention model for image paragraph captioning to keep track of attention history along with update-chain of decoder state. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Generative Cross-Domain Data Augmentation for Aspect and Opinion Co-Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to perform aspect and opinion co-extraction are difficult due to the lack of fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is more effective than previous domain adaptation methods on three datasets. |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
HOSMEL: A Hot-Swappable Modularized Entity Linking Toolkit for Chinese (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the use of entity linking (EL) in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a modularized entity linking toolkit for easy task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit achieves significantly better accuracy and less time and spaceconsumption than existing methods. |
FFAEval: Evaluating Dialogue System via Free-For-All Ranking (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems show poor correlation with human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a free-for-all human evaluation framework that shares dialogue history with annotators for multi-turn scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a strong correlation with human assessment on English and Chinese dialogue systems. |
Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing monolithic models for multilingual neural machine translation encounter parameter interference and inefficient inference for large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a detachable multi-way model that assigns each language to an individual branch . they use data from OPUS to build a translation benchmark covering 433 languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in OPUS and is faster than existing models. |
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenhe Wu, Jian Yang, Zhongjiang He, Changzai Pan, Jiaheng Liu, Xianjie Wu, Yu Zhao, Shuangyong Song, Yongxiang Li, Zhoujun Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Tables are a widely used data format that poses unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a region-based reinforcement learning approach that integrates region evidence into reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets and significantly reduces the reasoning token consumption by 67.5%. |
VIVA: A Benchmark for Vision-Grounded Decision-Making with Human Values (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
Adaptive Detoxification: Safeguarding General Capabilities of LLMs through Toxicity-Aware Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Lu, Jing Li, Yigeng Zhou, Yihui Zhang, Wenya Wang, Xiucheng Li, Meishan Zhang, Fangming Liu, Jun Yu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods for large language models (LLMs) suffer from over-editing, where detoxified models reject legitimate queries, compromising overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a toxicity-aware knowledge editing approach that dynamically detects toxic activation patterns during forward propagation and then routes computations through adaptive inter-layer pathways to mitigate toxicity effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on large language models and enhances the SafeEdit benchmark. |
Rethinking Text-based Protein Understanding: Retrieval or LLM? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating protein-related knowledge into large language models through continued pretraining and multi-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-enhanced method which significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that robots display human-like characteristics in dialogues . this anthropomorphism raises concerns about the accuracy of AI and its capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropophilic responses in robots . they propose to combine these two types of responses to create a new category of bot responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves the original dialogues from existing corpora and enhances them with paired responses: self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropophilic for each original bot response. |
ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and Select (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Our proposed method extracts N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes the task into two stages . they propose modal query and modal entity selection . their results show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three scientific information extraction datasets. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a global audience, so alignment must extend to cultural resonance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs on three large language models. |
Deep Learning on Graphs for Natural Language Processing (2021.naacl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for non-Euclidean data modeling and are used in many graph-related NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will cover applying deep learning on graph techniques to NLP using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Graph4NLP is the first library for researchers and practitioners for easy use of GNNs for various NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will cover the latest developments in deep learning on graph techniques and their applications in various NLP tasks. |
OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiguang Chen, Chengyu Luan, Jiajun Wu, Qiming Yu, Yi Yang, Yizhuo Li, Jingqi Tong, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks for large vision-language models emphasize single-image analysis and fail to exploit contextual information across multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Olympiad-level reasoning when evidence is distributed over multiple images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on bi-image Olympiads and Gemini-3-Pro on multimodal Olympiad-level reasoning tasks. |
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Pan, Rui Yang, Han Wang, Zhuan Zhou, Xuming He, Wenxiang Guo, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Li, Yu Zhang, Chenyuhao Wen, Ke Lei, Xiang Yin, Jingyu Lu, Zhiyuan Zhu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
Quantifying Adaptability in Pre-trained Language Models with 500 Tasks (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study examines the features and limits of LM adaptability to new tasks . many questions about the nature and limits remain unanswered . |
| Approach: | They evaluate adaptability to new tasks using a new benchmark, TaskBench500 . they find adaptation procedures differ dramatically in their ability to memorize small datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares 500 procedurally generated sequence modeling tasks to a new benchmark. |
Memory-enhanced Large Language Model for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing via Deep Hierarchical Syntax Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach can significantly improve the parsing accuracy of all baseline models, leading to new state-of-the-art results. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep hierarchical syntax understanding approach to improve the cross-lingual semantic memory capability of large language models by implicitly aligning linguistic knowledge between source and target languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the cross-lingual semantic memory capability of large language models by combining implicit multi-task fine-tuning and explicit label bank guiding. |
Reimagining Safety Alignment with An Image (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models face inefficiency, fragility, or architectural constraints, resulting in inefficient performance and heightened over-refusal in cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimization-driven visual prompt framework that enhances security and reduces over-refusal at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances security and reduces over-refusal while maintaining robust safety while reducing unnecessary denials. |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
Efficient Context and Schema Fusion Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to track dialogue state are limited due to data sparsity and long dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the previous dialogue state and current dialogue utterance as input for DST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and improves existing ones. |
Structure-Aware Language Model Pretraining Improves Dense Retrieval on Structured Data (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Structure Aware Dense Retrieval (SANTA) model encodes user queries and structured data in one universal embedding space for retrieving structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use structured data and unstructured data to encode queries and structured data in one universal embedding space for retrieving structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on code search and product search and conducts convincing results in the zero-shot setting. |
ExpSeek: Self-Triggered Experience Seeking for Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenyuan Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Shuaiyi Nie, Bingli Wu, Juwei Yue, Tingwen Liu, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating experience into web agents are struggling to adapt to dynamically changing contextual observations during agent-environment interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that shifts experience toward step-level proactive seeking by estimating step- level entropy thresholds and designing step-Level tailored experience content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 9.3% and 7.5% performance improvements on Qwen3-8B and 32B models across four challenging web agent benchmarks. |
E2LLM: Encoder Elongated Large Language Models for Long-Context Understanding and Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Considerable efforts have been and are still being put into increasing the context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that divides long contexts into chunks, compresses each into soft prompts using a pretrained text encoder, and aligns these representations with a decoder-only LLM via an adapter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms 8 state-of-the-art methods in effectiveness and efficiency for document summarization and question answering, and achieves the best performance on LongBench v2 among models of comparable size. |
MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems can support long-horizon human-LLM interactions by persisting historical interactions beyond limited context windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments memory systems with a self-evolving meta-memory . meta-meso is iteratively distilling transferable knowledge utilization experiences . results show MetaMem outperforms strong baselines by over 3.6% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by over 3.6% in the long-horizon human-LLM interaction. |
Feature Structure Matching for Multi-source Sentiment Analysis with Efficient Adaptive Tuning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing domain matching methods tend to pull all feature instances close, but they are expensive and expensive to update. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract multi-layer features from a large pre-trained model and propose a dynamic parameter fusion module to exploit them for efficient and adaptive tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is more robust and generalizable in the multi-source scenario. |
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs. |
CA-GAR: Context-Aware Alignment of LLM Generation for Document Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent techniques such as Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) and Generative Document Retrieleval (GDR) leverage LLMs to enhance retrieval performance but face key challenges: GAR’s generated content may not always align with the target document corpus, while GDR limits the generative capacity of LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a Context-Aware Generation-Augmented Retrieval approach which integrates corpus information into their generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that CA-GAR outperforms existing methods on seven tasks and four non-English languages. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
V-MAGE: A Game Evaluation Framework for Assessing Vision-Centric Capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangxi Zheng, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Ping Yu, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Lijuan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing static image-text benchmarks are insufficient for evaluating multimodal large language models’ dynamic perception and interactive reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-based evaluation framework to assess multimodal large language models’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically assesses MLLMs’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
UniGeM: Unifying Data Selection and Mixing via Geometric Exploration and Mining (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Wang, null Yunfeiyu, Xinhao Yao, Jiaolong Yang, Lu Yu, Junpeng Fang, Chaobo Li, Riccardo Cantoro, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) scaling is limited by data quality and domain mixing and instance selection are two separate problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies mixing and selection without training proxy models or relying on external reference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.0 data efficiency over a random baseline and further improves overall performance compared to SOTA methods in reasoning-heavy evaluations and multilingual generalization. |
Assist Non-native Viewers: Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for How2 Videos (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization methods are limited to monolingual videos . a proposed task aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos . they propose fusion network that integrates multimodal and cross-linguistic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms existing methods on a reorganized How2 dataset on the reorganized How2 data set. |
Intent-Driven Semantic ID Generation for Grounded Conversational News Recommendation (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new approach to news recommendation grounds each suggestion in a rapidly evolving article corpus while addressing implicit user intents that lack explicit retrievable keywords. |
| Approach: | They propose an intent-driven Semantic ID generation paradigm to address these challenges . they map diverse intents to hierarchical SID prefixes and then fuzzy-match them to current news pool . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 0% hallucination and 12.4% L1 match on a mainstream Chinese news platform. |
SynthFix: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Code Vulnerability Repair (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex semantic and structural correctness required for automated code repair. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural-symbolic framework that unifies code synthesis with compiler-informed symbolic feedback to improve LLM-based vulnerability repair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves code repair accuracy and efficiency over strong SFT and RFT training strategies on the FixJS and CodeFlaws benchmarks. |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
PAPILLON: Privacy Preservation from Internet-based and Local Language Model Ensembles (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has studied privacy in LLM training data memorization, but it does not prevent users from disclosing PII at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for chaining API-based and local LLMs that uses public data to construct a benchmark that contains personally identifiable information (PII) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains high response quality for 85.5% of user queries while restricting privacy leakage to only 7.5%. |
FAEDKV: Infinite-Window Fourier Transform for Unbiased KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current compression strategies, including token eviction and learned projections, often lead to biased representations and may require costly model retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free KV cache compression framework that equalizes the contribution of all tokens to the compressed representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures unbiased information retention in the KV cache. |
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks fail against reasoning models enhanced by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak method that uses Chain-of-Thought reasoning to reduce harmfulness from jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed jailbreak method performs well against open AI models and deepseek-R1 reasoning models. |
On the (In-)Security of the Shuffling Defense in the Transformer Secure Inference (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work reveals only randomly permuted activations to the client, allowing adversaries to extract model weights. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that aligns differently shuffled activations to a common permutation and exploits them to extract model weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can align shuffled activations to a common permutation and exploit them to extract model weights with a query cost of approximately $1. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
Robots-Dont-Cry: Understanding Falsely Anthropomorphic Utterances in Dialog Systems (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Dialog systems often output human-like responses, but some are impossible for a machine to say. |
| Approach: | They collect ratings on the feasibility of 900 two-turn dialogs from 9 data sources . they build classifiers and explore how modeling configuration might affect output permissibly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to train human-like dialogs, but it is not anthropomorphic. |
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks. |
Multi-Document Summarization with Determinantal Point Processes and Contextualized Representations (D19-54)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Determinantal point processes (DPP) is one of the best performing techniques for extractive summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine determinantal point processes with surface indicators for effective identification of summary-worthy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The determinantal point processes (DPP) framework is one of the best performing in summarization competitions. |
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bin Xu, Yu Bai, Huashan Sun, Yiguan Lin, Siming Liu, Xinyue Liang, Yaolin Li, Zhuangzhi Dong, Jingren Zhang, Yufan Deng, Xinyu Zou, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set. |
Interview Evaluation: A Novel Approach for Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Question Answering Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for CQA use pre-collected human-human conversations . previous methods use model-predicted dialogue history instead of ground truth . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation approach that uses the model's dialogue history to evaluate models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing models and their evaluations on QuAC and CoQA. |
BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural audio codecs have enabled high-fidelity reconstruction of speech, music and sound . however, speech-optimized codec systems suffer degradation on music or sound if they ignore spectral differences . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural audio codec that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that BSCodec achieves better reconstruction quality on music and sound compared to existing codecs. |
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong learning (LL) models require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture-based lifelong learning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in handling unseen tasks and focuses on task-level prompts to capture knowledge from different granularities. |
Text Detoxification: Data Efficiency, Semantic Preservation and Model Generalization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detoxification of text often rely on manually annotated data . xiangli: "detoxification of texts is a powerful way to remove toxic content" |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes detoxification and semantic preservation without annotating large amounts of data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes major limitations and surpasses humanannotated references across multiple benchmarks. |
ODD: A Benchmark Dataset for the Natural Language Processing Based Opioid Related Aberrant Behavior Detection (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Sunjae Kwon, Xun Wang, Weisong Liu, Emily Druhl, Minhee Sung, Joel Reisman, Wenjun Li, Robert Kerns, William Becker, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Opioid related aberrant behaviors (ORABs) present novel risk factors for opioid overdose. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a biomedical natural language processing benchmark dataset to classify ORABs from patients’ EHR notes into nine categories: confirmed aberrant behavior, suggested aberrant behaviors, Opioids, indication, diagnosed opioid dependency, Benzodiazepines, medication changes, and Central Nervous System-related. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms two state-of-the-art models in most categories and the gains are especially higher among uncommon classes. |
COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Manling Li, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ziqi Wang, Yi-shyuan Chiang, Tuan Lai, Pengfei Yu, Zixuan Zhang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | a new system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 related news . the system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a COVID-19 Claim Radar system that extracts supporting and refuting claims . the system leverages Wikidata as the hub to consolidate coreferential knowledge elements . |
| Outcome: | The system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 pandemic information . it leverages Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements . |
Measuring Correlation-to-Causation Exaggeration in Press Releases (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that press releases are a major source of exaggeration in science communication, which is later spread to mainstream media. |
| Approach: | They propose an NLP approach to identify exaggerated causal claims in health press releases that report on observational studies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can identify causal claims in press releases that report on observational studies. |
ZeroAE: Pre-trained Language Model based Autoencoder for Transductive Zero-shot Text Classification (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification use only encoders or decoders that do not allow for the use of labels in unseen domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an autoencoder that encodes text into two disentangled spaces and decodes it to generate text with labels in the unseen domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing methods in label-partially-unseen and label-fully-un-seeen scenarios and even outperfects the SOTA methods. |
Understanding User Resistance Strategies in Persuasive Conversations (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialog systems have various usages, such as donation persuation and physical exercise persulasion. |
| Approach: | They adopt a preliminary framework on persuasion resistance in psychology and build a fine-grained resistance strategy annotation scheme to analyze the persuitee's resistance strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can understand and address user resistance strategies appropriately. |
The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chulun Zhou, Qiujing Wang, Mo Yu, Xiaoqian Yue, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Yifan Zhou, Shunchi Zhang, Jie Zhou, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. |
| Approach: | They propose a CharToM-QA benchmark to assess the importance of comprehensive contextual understanding about personal backgrounds in ToM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 1,035 ToM questions based on classic novels and shows that educated participants perform better when they have read the novels than non-educated participants. |
TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Base (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | KBQA is a challenging area for pre-trained language models due to its extensive space and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses multi-grained retrieval to focus on most relevant KB contexts . constrained decoding is used to control output space and reduce generation errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on GrailQA and WebQuestionsSP. |
All Information is Valuable: Question Matching over Full Information Transmission Network (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for question matching only transmit one kind of information while failing to utilize both kinds of information simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a question matching network that can transmit both representation and interactive information together in a simultaneous fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baseline models on two standard benchmarks. |
OASIS: Order-Augmented Strategy for Improved Code Search (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Gao Zuchen, Zizheng Zhan, Xianming Li, Erxin Yu, Haotian Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yuqun Zhang, Jing Li
| Challenge: | Code embeddings capture the semantic representations of code and are crucial for various code-related large language model (LLM) applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an order-augmented strategy for improved code search that leverages order-based similarity labels to capture subtle differences in similarity among negative pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models focusing on major positive-negative differences. |
Eval-RAR: Evaluation-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation fail to provide explicit supervision for internal reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose an Evaluation-driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning framework that uses reinforcement learning and a fine-grained evaluation reward to optimize the process. |
| Outcome: | Eval-RAR outperforms existing methods on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop tasks. |
Improving Semantic Matching through Dependency-Enhanced Pre-trained Model with Adaptive Fusion (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on dependency prior structure integration into pre-trained models is still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based fusion attention paradigm which explicitly introduces dependency prior structure into pre-trained models and adaptively fuses it with semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 10 public datasets, demonstrating the benefits of adaptively fusing dependency structure in semantic matching task. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
Chain-of-Specificity: Enhancing Task-Specific Constraint Adherence in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhancing large language models fail to emphasize specific constraints and unlock the underlying knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that emphasizes specific constraints and unlocks knowledge within LLMs by iteratively emphasising on specific constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in enhancing generated content, especially in terms of specificity. |
RePALM: Popular Quote Tweet Generation via Auto-Response Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the wording of tweets can significantly impact popularity, reflected by user replies, retweets, and likes. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to generate popular quote tweets by leveraging augmented auto-responses from readers to align language generation with popularity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models that do not incorporate response augmentation and can generate popular quote tweets with augmented auto-responses. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
Conditional Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiwen Wang, Rahul Kidambi, Ryan Sullivan, Alekh Agarwal, Christoph Dann, Andrea Michi, Marco Gelmi, Yunxuan Li, Raghav Gupta, Kumar Dubey, Alexandre Rame, Johan Ferret, Geoffrey Cideron, Le Hou, Hongkun Yu, Amr Ahmed, Aranyak Mehta, Leonard Hussenot, Olivier Bachem, Edouard Leurent
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (RL) are difficult due to plurality of preferences and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for finetuning language models on multiple objectives using conditional language policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms and Pareto-dominates existing approaches for multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (RL) it does not require training or maintaining multiple models to achieve different trade-offs between the objectives. |
Promoting Pre-trained LM with Linguistic Features on Automatic Readability Assessment (2022.aacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automatic readability assessment (ARA) aims at classifying the readability level of a text automatically. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate linguistic features with pre-trained language models to improve the accuracy of ARA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on the long passage characteristic of ARA using commonly used linguistic features and abundant datasets. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
ARCHITECT: Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Tool Learning via Causal Intervention for Open-World Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods treat all generated tools as equally trustworthy, a "blind trust" assumption that is untenable for reliable agent deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves beyond black-box reliability prediction to interpretable failure attribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks including StableToolBench, MINT, T-Eval, and SWE-bench Lite. |
Unveiling Factual Recall Behaviors of Large Language Models through Knowledge Neurons (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have underscored their exceptional reasoning prowess with natural language understanding across a broad spectrum of tasks. |
| Approach: | They examine whether Large Language Models actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning performance while suppressing it leads to notable degradation. |
Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Collaboration via Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive accomplishments in reasoning and planning, but their abilities in multi-agent collaborations remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use explicit belief state representations to enhance task performance and the accuracy of ToM inferences for LLM-based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and accuracy of ToM inferences for LLM-based agents. |
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | NoteChat is a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating patient-physician dialogues . evaluator finds it outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . clinical documentation is largely done by physicians at both steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models to generate patient-physician dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . it can engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout . |
Re-TASK: Revisiting LLM Tasks from Capability, Skill, and Knowledge Perspectives (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhihu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Yu Wang, Heyuan Huang, Sitao Xie, Yubo Zhang, Jiaxin Shi, Zhixing Wang, Hongyan Li, Junchi Yan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving complex tasks with large language models (LLMs) fail to decompose tasks accurately or execute subtasks effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Learning (CoL) paradigm that highlights task dependencies on specific capability items, further broken down into their constituent knowledge and skill components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Yi-1.5-9B and Llama3-Chinese-8B for legal tasks by 45.00% and 24.50% on different domains. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
Graph Attention Network with Memory Fusion for Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies ignored the syntactic relationship between the aspect and its corresponding context words, leading the model to focus on syntaktically unrelated words mistakenly. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the graph convolutional network by assigning different weights to edges of connected words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve on five datasets showing that it learns and exploits multiword relations and draws different weights of words to improve performance. |
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for semantic parsing are too small in terms of number of programs for training modern data-intensive models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing task for a database . they use a dataset with 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is different from previous tasks because it uses the same database and program . the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. |
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Xinyi Dai, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain. |
On the Complementarity between Pre-Training and Random-Initialization for Resource-Rich Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-Training (PT) of text representations has been successfully applied to low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT) however, it often fails to achieve notable gains on resource-rich NMT on par with its Random-Initialization (RI) counterpart. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-training and random-initialization techniques to achieve significant improvements in NMT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fusion algorithm can achieve significant improvements on two resource-rich translation benchmarks. |
Learning Confidence for Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | A well-calibrated confidence estimate is not sufficient for neural machine translation (NMT) where probabilities from softmax distribution fail to describe when the model is probably mistaken. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised confidence estimate learning jointly with the training of a neural machine translation model to quantify confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard label smoothing and can predict failures in two real-world scenarios. |
RegTrack: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Multi-Class Legal Change Detection (2026.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models lack finegrained classification schemes to determine whether small changes impact legal obligations or merely update formatting. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for change detection in EU regulations that uses 4,772 manually annotated pairs of structurally distinct provisions mapped to a six-class taxonomy of legal change types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines lexical algorithms, dense encoders, and Large Language Models (LLMs) as baselines. |
Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data. |
Low Resource Style Transfer via Domain Adaptive Meta Learning (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised text style transfer methods suffer from performance degradation when fine-tuning the model in new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptive meta-learning approach with an adversarial style training approach for better content preservation and style transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generalizes well on unseen low-resource domains against ten strong baselines. |
Beyond Self-Report: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap in Critical Thinking Assessment via Interpretable Multi-Agent System (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zekun Li, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Ye He, Daniel Zhang-Li, Shangqing Tu, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Yikun Jiang, Jiaxin Yuan, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Accurate assessment of critical thinking is limited by the Intention Behavior Gap in psychology . evaluators that measure self-reported competence are limited by multiagent architectures . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes cognitive assessment into an interpretable multi-agent workflow with Assessment Chain-of-Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns better with human expert ratings than gold-standard inventories on large-scale simulations and human participants. |
Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Wang, Yue Liu, Baolong Bi, Duzhen Zhang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Yingwei Ma, Yufei He, Shengju Yu, Xinfeng Li, Junfeng Fang, Jiaheng Zhang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have a high level of advanced reasoning capabilities, but they are vulnerable and vulnerable. |
| Approach: | This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of Large Reasoning Models . it explores the new safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies specific to LRMs based on reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed study examines the safety and security risks of large reasoning models. |
Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current research on developing computational models of social norms has focused on American society. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage a Chinese Q&A platform and a socialchiemistry dataset as proxies for contrasting cultural axes and align social situations cross-culturally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reason across cultures using a Chinese Q&A platform and the existing socialChemistry dataset. |
OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Wenbo Li, Amirali Amini, Bo Sun, Yakov Bart, Weimin Lyu, Jiri Gesi, Tian Wang, Jing Huang, Yu Su, Upol Ehsan, Malihe Alikhani, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Lydia Chilton, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | evaluating LLMs' ability to mimic real user behavior remains an open challenge due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual user. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first to evaluate how well current LLMs can accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Multi-step Problem Solving Through a Verifier: An Empirical Analysis on Model-induced Process Supervision (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a method for process supervision has shown significant improvements in multi-step problem solving . despite the advances in process supervision, there are still easily observable mistakes in state-of-the-art LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automating data curation by using a trained verifier to evaluate intermediate steps generated by a reasoner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of PaLM 2 on math and coding tasks. |
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization? (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text summarization is a key natural language generation task, but the high cost of inaccurate summaries raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarisation (UE-TS) evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a UE-TS benchmark that evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. |
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have improved the performance of Large language models on well-defined mathematical benchmarks, but they often overlook ill-defined problems. |
| Approach: | They develop a large-scale benchmark that contains over 5,000 ill-defined mathematical problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability. |
Learning Matching Models with Weak Supervision for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots (P18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn matching models for retrieval-based chatbots are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sequence-to-sequence architecture model as a weak annotator to judge the matching degree of unlabeled pairs and performs learning with both the weak signals and the unlabed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two public data sets on matching models on retrieval-based chatbots. |
ForestCast: Open-Ended Event Forecasting with Semantic News Forest (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches and datasets overlook the complex relationships among events . current research lacks comprehensive evaluation methods to evaluate OEEF . |
| Approach: | They propose a prediction pipeline that extracts forecast-relevant events from news data . forestcast organizes news events into a story tree and predicts subsequent events along each path . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline extracts forecast-relevant events from news data and predicts subsequent events along each path. |
MoleculeQA: A Dataset to Evaluate Factual Accuracy in Molecular Comprehension (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models generate erroneous information and evaluations fail to assess factual correctness of models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MoleculeQA to evaluate molecular factual correctness in large language models by organizing molecules into a taxonomy and building QA pairs through human and LLM efforts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the factual correctness of generated information and enables the development of new models. |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on aligning large language models with pre-trained datasets. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous analysis of a three-stage training pipeline using sequence packing, loss masking and increasing the preference dataset size in DPO to improve the performance of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
AIR: Complex Instruction Generation via Automatic Iterative Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts (2025.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Training conversational question-answering systems requires in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a bottom-up approach where QA pairs are generated first and combined into a coherent dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods. |
Breakthrough from Nuance and Inconsistency: Enhancing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion and Word Weight Calculation. (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection rely on feature concatenation to fuse different modalities or model inconsistencies among modalités. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion to integrate local and momentary multimodal information into specific words to illustrate the inconsistencies between connotation and denotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 76.9 and an F1 score of 76.1 on the MUStARD dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art IWAN model by 1.7 and 1.6 respectively. |
Complementary Evidence Identification in Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA that only measure the relevance between the question and each paragraph are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns vector representations of passages and models the sufficiency and diversity within the selected set, in addition to the relevance between the question and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of complementary evidence selection in open-domain question answering domain. |
CodePRM: Execution Feedback-enhanced Process Reward Model for Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in code generation focus on optimizing the thought process, but lack effective process supervision, making it difficult to optimize the thoughts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM by collecting a large dataset of thought traces and then training it to take both the reasoning process and code execution as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and strong LLMs in the inference stage. |
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level relation extraction relied on implicitly powerful representations, which makes the model less transparent. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in relation performance and logical consistency. |
DeTAM: Defending LLMs Against Jailbreak Attacks via Targeted Attention Modification (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defense methods rely on fine-tuning or input modification, which suffer from limited generalization and reduced utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a finetuning-free approach that improves the defensive capabilities against jailbreak attacks of LLMs via targeted attention modification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines in jailbreak defense and exhibits robust generalization across attacks and models, maintaining its effectiveness even on in-the-wild jailbreak data. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Compressing Sentence Representation for Semantic Retrieval via Homomorphic Projective Distillation (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models produce large sentence embeddings, resulting in performance gap between large and small models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments a small Transformer encoder model with learnable projection layers to produce compact sentences while mimicking a large pre-trained language model to retain the sentence representation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.7-4.5 points performance gain on STS and SR tasks while maintaining the quality of the pre-trained language models. |
The Stochastic Parrot on LLM’s Shoulder: A Summative Assessment of Physical Concept Understanding (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs) many researchers argue that LLMs may not * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that summarises the memorization issue by using grid inputs that abstractly describe physical phenomena. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task alleviates the memorization issue by using grid-format inputs that abstractly describe physical phenomena. |
CTTA-T: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Text Understanding via Teacher-Student with a Domain-aware and Generalized Teacher (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianlun Liu, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Xingzhi Zhou, Wanlong Yu, Tianle Liu, Feng Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing models for text understanding fail to adapt to domain shifts in real-world applications . current models do not improve themselves as they are applied to new domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a continual test-time adaptation framework that adapts to evolving domains . they propose accumulating domains and a refine-then-filter framework to calibrate teacher predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in a teacher-student framework adaptable to evolving domains. |
Learning Inter-Entity-Interaction for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent FKGC studies focus on learning semantic representations of entity pairs by separately encoding the neighborhoods of head and tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to learn semantic representations of entity pairs by separately encoding the neighborhoods of head and tail entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets. |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal content detection fail to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies and ignore inherent noise in multimodal features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal rumor detection method based on a frequency domain spectral selection method and entropy-guided uncertainty fusion method to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection . it shows stronger detection capability and robustness on multiple datasets . |
Living in the Moment: Can Large Language Models Grasp Co-Temporal Reasoning? (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current temporal reasoning datasets are limited to questions about single or isolated events, falling short in mirroring the realistic temporal characteristics involving concurrent nature and intricate temporal interconnections. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-temporal Question Answering benchmark that contains four co-time scenarios with 4,748 samples for evaluating the co-timing abilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LLMs struggle on CoTempQA tasks even when enhanced with Chain of Thought methodologies. |
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets. |
TimeR4 : Time-aware Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge in Temporal knowledge graphs (TKTs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Time-aware retrieve-rewrite-retrieve-rerank framework to integrate temporal knowledge from TKGs into Large Language Models (LLMs) to reduce temporal hallucination, they propose rewrite module to rew questions using background knowledge stored in TKG's, then implement a retrieve-rank module to retrieve semantically and temporally relevant facts from Tkgs and rerank them according to temporal constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves relative gains of 47.8% and 22.5% on two datasets, underscoring its effectiveness in boosting the temporal reasoning abilities of LLMs. |
META-LORA: Memory-Efficient Sample Reweighting for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely adopted for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient method for automatic sample reweighting that learns to re-weight fine-tuning samples by minimizing the loss on a small, high-quality validation set. |
| Outcome: | Meta-LoRA learns to reweight fine-tuning samples by minimizing the loss on a small, high-quality validation set through an end-to-end bi-level optimization framework based on meta-learning. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
When Truthful Representations Flip Under Deceptive Instructions? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. |
| Approach: | They use Sparse Autoencoders to analyze LLM's internal representations to determine when and how they "flip" from truthful to deceptive under deceptively crafted instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's True/False output is predictable across all conditions based on the model''s representation, and the Deceptive instructions induce significant representational shifts compared to Truthful/Neutral representations. |
A Strategic Coordination Framework of Small LMs Matches Large LMs in Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from high computational costs and environmental inefficiency . smaller LMs are more accessible and sustainable, but their individual capabilities often fall short . a collaborative framework for small LM combines specialized roles to iterative refinement and quality control . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by a single large LM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by large LM. |
MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing MVQA models ignore multi-level progressive capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level visual language model for medical visual question answering (MVQA) which covers multi- level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models on a multi-level instruction dataset and a feature alignment module. |
Aligning as Debiasing: Causality-Aware Alignment via Reinforcement Learning with Interventional Feedback (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce LLMs' biased outputs rely on reward signals from current model outputs without considering the source of biases. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the reward model in RL alignment as an instrumental variable to perform causal intervention on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces biases by using human feedback to fine tune LLMs to human values. |
End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can generate responses in an end-to end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of EToD and propose a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches and recent trends. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. |
CasEE: A Joint Learning Framework with Cascade Decoding for Overlapping Event Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that events appear in sentences without overlaps . overlapping event extraction is a challenging task in natural language understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework with cascade decoding for overlapping event extraction . they sequentially perform type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction based on the specific former prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a public event extraction benchmark . it sequentially performs type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction . |
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Timeline Summarization based on Event Graph Compression via Time-Aware Optimal Transport (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for timeline summarization ignore the events’ intra-structures and inter-structure connections. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent news articles as an event-graph, thus compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on the state-of-the-art on three real-world datasets, including two public benchmarks and a Timeline100 dataset. |
Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot Learners (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pre-trained language models require fine-tuning on labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a nonparametric prompting PLM for fully zero-shot language understanding . they compare it to previous methods for text classification and text entailment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on diverse tasks. |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Affective responses to music are highly personal, but it's difficult to measure marginal effects of these variables . a study of 403M listener comments on a social music platform in china aims to address this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose to measure affective responses to music from 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method identifies musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. |
Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotional Support Conversation task and an ESC Framework to train emotional support into dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides an example of an Emotional Support Conversation task and shows that it is more effective than existing models. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
Rethinking Cross-Subject Data Splitting for Brain-to-Text Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have successfully decoded natural language from non-invasive brain signals . current dataset splitting methods suffer from data leakage problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a right cross-subject data splitting criterion without data leakage for decoding fMRI and EEG signal to text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overfits and overestimates brain-to-text decoding models. |
EvoCoT: Overcoming the Exploration Bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) are limited by difficulty or lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving curriculum learning framework based on chain-of-thought reasoning optimization that constrains exploration space by self-generating and verifying CoT trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to solve previously unsolved problems without external supervision and is compatible with various RL fine-tuning methods. |
The UIR Uncertainty Corpus for Chinese: Annotating Chinese Microblog Corpus for Uncertainty Identification from Social Media (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Uncertainty identification is an important semantic processing task, critical to the quality of information in terms of factuality in many NLP techniques and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate Chinese microblogs with an open uncertainty corpus . they propose to use contextual uncertain semantics rather than traditional cue-phrases to identify uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus can be used to identify uncertainty in social media texts. |
Transforming Visual Scene Graphs to Image Captions (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Yang, Jiawei Peng, Zihua Wang, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Zhangzikang Li, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate captions using image captioning are based on multi-head attention (MHA) |
| Approach: | They propose to transform scene graphs into more descriptive captions by using multi-head attention to build a Graph Neural Network (GNN) . they construct a Mixture-of-Expert (MOE)-based decoder where each expert is built on MHA for discriminating the graph embeddings to generate different kinds of words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate captions from multiple visual features and objects . it is based on a mixture-of-expert (MOE)-based decoder based upon MHA . |
Efficient Second-Order TreeCRF for Neural Dependency Parsing (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In the deep learning (DL) era, dependency parsing models are extremely simplified with little hurt on performance thanks to the remarkable capability of multi-layer BiLSTMs in context representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the biaffine parser to a second-order TreeCRF extension to reduce the complexity of the inside-outside algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension can be used to batchify the inside and Viterbi algorithms and avoid the complex outside algorithm via efficient back-propagation. |
Chunks as Arms: Multi-Armed Bandit-Guided Sampling for Long-Context LLM Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shaohua Duan, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Xiaoyuan Yi, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored fine-tuning Large Language Models with synthetic data to enhance their long-context capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a Multi-Armed Bandit rollout strategy to identify the most informative chunks from the given long context for sampling high-quality and diverse responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4% improvement on long-context reasoning benchmarks on Llama and Qwen. |
Debiasing Generative Named Entity Recognition by Calibrating Sequence Likelihood (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to recognize flat, overlapped and discontinuous entities uniformly have been used for Named Entity Recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reranking-based approach that redistributes the likelihood among candidate sequences depending on their performance via a contrastive loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts baseline and yields competitive or better results compared with the state-of-the-art methods on 8 widely-used datasets for Named Entity Recognition. |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for classical Chinese poetry generation only allow users to use keywords to interfere with the meaning of generated poems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate classical Chinese poems from vernacular . their model uses unsupervised machine translation to generate Chinese poems . human evaluation shows it can generate high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems - authors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the perplexity and BLEU of the proposed model compared with typical models and human evaluation shows it generates high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems. |
Self-Reinforcing Controllable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data via Bayesian Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chongsheng Zhang, Hao Wang, Zelong Yu, Esteban Garces Arias, Julian Rodemann, Zhanshuo Zhang, Qilong Li, Gaojuan Fan, Krikamol Muandet, Christian Heumann
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesis of relational/structured tabular data lack effective feedback mechanism to optimize quality of generated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a relational data generator with dynamic guidance framework that uses chain-of-thought steps to generate tabular data for enhancing downstream imbalanced classification performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in both data fidelity and downstream imbalanced classification performance on real and synthetic datasets. |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for post-training large datasets are requiring a large computational effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the changes at logits level during post-training using a separate neural network . they demonstrate that the value network can be seamlessly integrated with another pre-trained model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be integrated with another pre-trained model during inference, enabling similar capability enhancements. |
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) rely on general pre-trained language models without a tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora and a perturbation-based strategy to capture causality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy yields significant and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. |
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qibing Ren, Hao Li, Dongrui Liu, Zhanxu Xie, Xiaoya Lu, Yu Qiao, Lei Sha, Junchi Yan, Lizhuang Ma, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. |
Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
Training Long-Context LLMs Efficiently via Chunk-wise Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in long-context large language models have demonstrated superior retrieval quality compared to retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient training paradigm that partitions lengthy inputs into manageable chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model expands maximum sequence length from 1K to 16K tokens on a single RTX 3090 GPU, while SpaCO achieves accelerated training speed. |
Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-based question answering (TBQA) has been studied extensively in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamically Fused Graph Network to answer questions requiring multiple scattered evidence and reasoning over them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results on a public TBQA dataset and produces interpretable reasoning chains. |
Defining a New NLP Playground (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Sha Li, Chi Han, Pengfei Yu, Carl Edwards, Manling Li, Xingyao Wang, Yi Fung, Charles Yu, Joel Tetreault, Eduard Hovy, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. |
| Approach: | They propose 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions to define a new NLP playground by combining theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed research will cover theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications. |
Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel graph for narrative comprehension captures coherence between passages in narratives . end-to-end paradigms are effective for comprehension tasks, but may not be sufficient for all comprehension scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph dubbed NarCo which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations. |
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factuality detection methods are not effective for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that trains on offline consistency checking results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification and improves on factuality detection and question answering benchmarks. |
We Need to Talk About Reproducibility in NLP Model Comparison (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that standard splits produce low reproducible and unreliable conclusions . reproducibility of empirical experimental conclusions is a problem in NLP domain . |
| Approach: | They propose to transform the reproducibility of a model comparison into a probabilistic function . they propose to use a regularized corpus splitting strategy to estimate the model's performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed estimator achieves a high SNR and significantly increases reproducibility. |
ReCUT: Balancing Reasoning Length and Accuracy in LLMs via Stepwise Trails and Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhensheng Jin, Xinze Li, Yifan Ji, Chunyi Peng, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Furong Peng, Ge Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train LLMs suffer from overthinking, leading to lengthy reasoning traces . Existing approaches to train large language models suffer from this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to combine multiple reasoning chains for training LLMs . they use stepwise exploration and long-short switched sampling to evaluate reasoning paths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reasoning lengths by approximately 30-50% . it also maintains or improves reasoning accuracy compared to baselines . |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
HTCInfoMax: A Global Model for Hierarchical Text Classification via Information Maximization (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for hierarchical text classification do not consider statistical constraint on label representations learned by structure encoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a new hierarchical text classification model called HTCInfoMax which incorporates two modules to improve the model's representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the interaction between each text sample and its ground truth labels explicitly which filters out irrelevant information. |
A Multi-Persona Chatbot for Hotline Counselor Training (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a chatbot cannot replace a counselor, but a simulation of intimate situations is needed to train counselors. |
| Approach: | They propose a counseling strategy annotation scheme and a multi-task framework that mimics prototype conversations to train counselors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly increases response diversity and specificity, with limited impact to coherence. |
On the Transformer Growth for Progressive BERT Training (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods only conduct network growth in a single dimension, but compound growth operators are beneficial for multiple dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train BERT progressively using a Transformer model and explore alternative growth operators in each dimension via controlled comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method speeds up BERT pre-training by 73.6% and 82.2% for the base and large models respectively while achieving comparable performances. |
A Fine-grained Chinese Software Privacy Policy Dataset for Sequence Labeling and Regulation Compliant Identification (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets that ignore law requirements are limited to English. |
| Approach: | They construct a Chinese privacy policy dataset that can be used to analyze software privacy policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 483 Chinese Android privacy policies, over 11K sentences, and 52K fine-grained annotations. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models under Microscaling Floating Point Formats (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) is a low-precision format for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic evaluations of PTQ under Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) . they find that MXFP8 consistently achieves near-lossless performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves near-lossless performance while MXFP4 introduces substantial accuracy degradation and remains challenging. |
F-Eval: Asssessing Fundamental Abilities with Refined Evaluation Methods (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Sun, Keyuchen Keyuchen, Shujie Wang, Peiji Li, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been evaluated for their instruction-following capabilities but lack references to their fundamental abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities of large language models including expression, commonsense and logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. |
Multi-step Reasoning via Recurrent Dual Attention for Visual Dialog (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for visual dialog infer the answer through multiple reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for visual dialog that uses multi-step reasoning to answer questions about an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a new state-of-the-art of 64.47% on the VisDial v1.0 dataset . |
Action Boundary Blindness: When LLM Agents Cannot Tell Where One Action Ends and Another Begins (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language model agents exhibit action boundary blindness, granularity confusion, scope creep and boundary ambiguity . Explicit boundary prompting improves ABS by 0.08–0.13 across all models . |
| Approach: | They propose four automatic metrics that require no human annotation to detect boundary blindness . they propose to use a multi-label attribution framework to validate the models . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with seven large language model agents show that the best model achieves only 0.424 ABS . Explicit Boundary Prompting improves ABS by 0.08–0.13 across all models . |
HqeKV: Towards Hybrid Quantization and Eviction for KV Cache in Long-Context LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | autoregressive inference requires repeated computation across transformer layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid compression framework built on both quantization and eviction . they propose varying importance metric and flexible conversion policies to reduce memory overhead . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods under memory constraints. |
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models are evaluated on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize OpenIE over unseen target domains with different data distributions from source training domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the previous methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings by 6.0% in F1 score absolutely. |
LEGOEval: An Open-Source Toolkit for Dialogue System Evaluation via Crowdsourcing (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, researchers use automatic metrics and human evaluation to evaluate dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Python API to easily evaluate dialogue systems using Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
| Outcome: | The open-source toolkit provides a fast, consistent method for reproducing human evaluation results. |
Keyphrase Generation with Correlation Constraints (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for keyphrase generation ignore correlation among keyphrases, resulting in duplication and coverage issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sequence-to-sequence architecture for keyphrase generation that captures correlation among keyphrases by preceding phrases to eliminate duplicate phrases and improve result coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art method on benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy and diversity. |
Bridging the Editing Gap in LLMs: FineEdit for Precise and Targeted Text Modifications (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models can perform precise text editing tasks. |
| Approach: | InstrEditBench is a benchmark dataset that compares 30,000 structured editing tasks . experimental evaluations show FineEdit outperforms state-of-the-art models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on single-turn edits and mistral-7B-OpenOrca on direct edits. |
HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can reveal toxic or offensive content inadvertently or intentionally. |
| Approach: | They propose to control the diversity of both sides according to the number of samples for fine-tuning, which can directly reflect their impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models after fine-tuning. |
LLMs as World Models: Data-Driven and Human-Centered Pre-Event Simulation for Disaster Impact Assessment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promise in simulating complex scenarios. |
| Approach: | They examine multiple LLMs to proactively estimate perceived earthquake impacts using multimodal datasets and multimodal imagery. |
| Outcome: | The framework generates Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) predictions at zip code and county scales using multimodal datasets. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
UltraIF: Advancing Instruction Following from the Wild (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a lack of transparency has resulted in a gap between research community and leading companies . large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in following complex instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build large language models that can follow complex instructions with open-source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can synergize complex instructions and filter responses with evaluation questions. |
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, but they introduce safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark to assess the trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates truthfulness, safety and efficiency on 26 models. |
EIFBENCH: Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focusing on single-task environments with limited constraints lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Segment Policy Optimization algorithm to enhance the LLM's ability to accurately fulfill multi-task workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that existing benchmarks lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models. |
RankCoT: Refining Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Ranking Chain-of-Thoughts (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models enable Large Language Models to access external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge refinement method that incorporates reranking signals to generate CoT-based summarization based on query and retrieval documents. |
| Outcome: | RankCoT generates CoT-based summarization based on query and all retrieval documents . Rank CoT incorporates a self-reflection mechanism that refines the outputs . |
The CRECIL Corpus: a New Dataset for Extraction of Relations between Characters in Chinese Multi-party Dialogues (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yuru Jiang, Yang Xu, Yuhang Zhan, Weikai He, Yilin Wang, Zixuan Xi, Meiyun Wang, Xinyu Li, Yu Li, Yanchao Yu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on relation extraction between two entities in one sentence, and some focus on cross-sentence relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese multi-party dialogue dataset for automatic extraction of dialogue-based character relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extracts relationships between 140 entities on the CRECIL corpus and another existing relation extraction corpus. |
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, Jingyu Lu, Rongjie Huang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Zhiqing Hong, Ziyue Jiang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for song generation fail to generate vocals with prompt-based control and proper alignment. |
| Approach: | VersBand is a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality songs with prompt-based control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that VersBand performs better than baseline models across multiple song generation tasks. |
When Safety Alignment Fails to Generalize: Probing with Language Game Jailbreaks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fixed or narrow transformation schemes to generalize . existing methods based on fixed and narrow transformations are often inadequate . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for discovering and refining language game-based jailbreaks to probe alignment generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows controlled exploration of alignment behavior across closely related linguistic variants. |
What to Fuse and How to Fuse: Exploring Emotion and Personality Fusion Strategies for Explainable Mental Disorder Detection (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders (MHD) are one of the greatest challenges facing our healthcare systems and modern societies in general. |
| Approach: | They integrate and extend the research by conducting extensive experiments with three types of deep learning-based fusion strategies: feature-level fusion, model fusion and task fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques show that they can be used to improve mental health detection from textual data. |
EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Zhang, Chen Huang, Yueke Zhang, Jiahao Zhang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Collin McMillan, Kevin Leach, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Code Language Models learn attention based on statistical input-output token correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in three languages, with gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Rˆ3Net:Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network for Change Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on change captioning uses a natural language sentence to describe disagreement between two images. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network to distinguish real change from clutter and irrelevant changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on two public datasets. |
Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Chenlong Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks due to their remarkable ability in context modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel context encoding to reduce attention entropy by incorporating attention sinks and selective mechanisms to reduce irregular attention . they also propose to incorporate attention sink mechanisms into the parallel encoded context to reduce the irregular attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lower irregular attention entropy and narrow performance gaps. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
AwarenessBench: Assessing Cognitive Capabilities of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaojian Li, Rongwu Xu, Tianyun Zhang, Yue Wang, Shuo Chen, Qiner Lyu, Briana Zhang, Peiran Yang, Kyle Xue Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Yu Wang, Wei Xu
| Challenge: | Language models exhibit increasingly consciousness-like behaviors, requiring a baseline to evaluate their cognitive abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the cognitive abilities of language models (LMs) they compare 18 state-of-the-art LMs to human models in metacognition, self-awareness, social awareness and situational awareness . |
| Outcome: | Evaluating 18 state-of-the-art LMs, they find they consistently surpass baselines . but most models fall short in metacognition and self-awareness, the study finds . |
Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing question generation systems focus on the internal knowledge within the textual passage or the semantic word space for diverse content planning. Existing solutions focus on relying on the knowledge of the text and the semantic words, but have not considered the potential of external knowledge for expression diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer that utilizes the style of diverse templates for question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on diversity while being comparable in terms of consistency scores. |
MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive progress in mathematical problem-solving . current approaches to enhance mathematical reasoning focus on instance-level modifications . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances mathematical reasoning through cross-problem instruction synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts mathematical reasoning by 18.0 points while maintaining high data efficiency. |
Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Artidoro Pagnoni, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Pedro Rodriguez, John Nguyen, Benjamin Muller, Margaret Li, Chunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Jason E Weston, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh, Mike Lewis, Ari Holtzman, Srini Iyer
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) are trained on bytes, except for tokenization, which groups bytes into a static set of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a new byte-level LLM architecture that encodes bytes into dynamically sized patches, which serve as the primary units of computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture matches tokenization-based models with improvements in inference efficiency and robustness. |
Text Style Transfer Back-Translation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Daimeng Wei, Zhanglin Wu, Hengchao Shang, Zongyao Li, Minghan Wang, Jiaxin Guo, Xiaoyu Chen, Zhengzhe Yu, Hao Yang
| Challenge: | Current methods require large amount of bilingual training data, which is challenging and sometimes impossible task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to modify the style of inputs by modifying the source side of BT data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves translation quality against popular BT benchmarks on high-resource and low-resourced language pairs. |
MCP-Guard: A Multi-Stage Defense-in-Depth Framework for Securing Model Context Protocol in Agentic AI (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenpeng Xing, Zhonghao Qi, Yupeng Qin, Yilin Li, Caini Chang, Jiahui Yu, Changting Lin, Zhenzhen Xie, Meng Han
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak, authors say . authors propose a robust, layered defense architecture designed for LLM–tool interactions . |
| Approach: | They propose a robust, layered defense architecture designed for LLM–tool interactions . they propose XCP-Guard, which employs a three-stage detection pipeline . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 96.01% accuracy in identifying adversarial prompts . the model is based on a three-stage detection pipeline that balances efficiency with accuracy . |
PREE: Towards Harmless and Adaptive Fingerprint Editing in Large Language Models via Knowledge Prefix Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing black-box fingerprinting techniques rely on overfitting high-perplexity trigger patterns . experimental results show that model editing in the fingerprint domain exhibits unique advantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-enhanced fingerprint editing framework that encodes copyright information into parameter offsets through dual-channel knowledge edit to achieve covert embedding of fingerprint features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing framework achieves 90% trigger precision in mainstream architectures . the proposed model editor achieves the 90% accuracy in mainstream models . |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model underperforms on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks. |
Towards Abstractive Grounded Summarization of Podcast Transcripts (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Podcast summarization is of practical benefit to content providers and consumers . however, podcast summarizing faces significant challenges including factual inconsistencies . speech recognizers induce transcription errors and abstractive summarisation models may hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate podcast summaries while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can produce an abstractive summary while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
To See a World in a Spark of Neuron: Disentangling Multi-Task Interference for Training-Free Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zitao Fang, Guodong Du, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yiwei Zhang, Yiyao Cao, Jing Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model merging ignore the fundamental roles of neurons, connectivity and activation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that relies on neuronal mechanisms to mitigate task interference . they decomposed task-specific representations into two complementary subspaces . their results offer new insights into mitigating task interference and improving knowledge fusion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task interference within neurons and improves knowledge fusion. |
UI-Hawk: Unleashing the Screen Stream Understanding for Mobile GUI Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents depend on current visual observations and plain-text action history, ignoring the significance of history screens. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal GUI agent specifically designed to process screen streams . they propose UI-Hawk incorporates a history-aware visual encoder to handle the sequences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent can process screen streams encountered during GUI navigation. |
BENTO: A Visual Platform for Building Clinical NLP Pipelines Based on CodaLab (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CodaLab has limited support for creating reusable tools that can be easily applied to different datasets and composed into pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow management platform with a graphic user interface built on top of CodaLab to facilitate the process of building clinical NLP pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow management platform, BENTO, is designed for clinical NLP tasks and can be easily used by researchers and developers. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
GHAN: Graph-Based Hierarchical Aggregation Network for Text-Video Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Jin, Chulin Xie, Jiawei Zhang, Kashob Kumar Roy, Yu Zhang, Zheng Li, Ruirui Li, Xianfeng Tang, Suhang Wang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest augmenting LLMs with external text corpora to alleviate hallucination problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment large language models with text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on GRBench with three LLMs and shows that iterative reasoning outperformed the baselines. |
Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation: Small Models Can Also “Think” Step-by-Step (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Symbolic Chain-of-thought Distillation (SCoTD) is a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations sampled from a significantly larger teacher model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations from a larger teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a student model in supervised and few-shot settings and especially for challenge sets. |
Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Lida He, Qi Zhou, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Yi Wang, Wei Li, Qingyu Wang, Jiatao Li, Wei Gong, Jialei Zeng, Jingmei Zhao, Ke Jiang, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold. |
Dimension Reduction for Efficient Dense Retrieval via Conditional Autoencoder (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work reserves the principle dimensions of query and document embeddings for building more efficient retrieval systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Conditional Autoencoder to compress high-dimensional embeddings to maintain the same embeddable distribution and better recover ranking features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves comparable ranking performance with its teacher model and makes the retrieval system more efficient. |
Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict characters' personalities have not been studied in the NLP field due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to predict characters' personalities that uses an exhaustive vocabulary of personality traits as targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is efficient and accurate and relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. |
DIONYSUS: A Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing dialogues lack in taking into account the structure of dialogues and rely heavily on labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained encoder-decoder model for summarizing dialogues in any new domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on six datasets and shows ROUGE scores in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yanda Li, Chi Zhang, Gang Yu, Wanqi Yang, Zhibin Wang, Bin Fu, Guosheng Lin, Chunhua Shen, Ling Chen, Yunchao Wei
| Challenge: | OpenAI's GPT-4 has demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities, but specific mechanics of GPT4 remain unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose a data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on ten commonly assessed models and provides greater flexibility compared to existing methods. |
Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation. |
Cross-lingual Cross-modal Pretraining for Multimodal Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent pretrained vision-language models have achieved impressive performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks in English. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to learn cross-lingual cross-modal representations for matching images and captions in multiple languages using an annotated corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive performance on two multimodal multilingual image caption benchmarks: Multi30k with German captions and MSCOCO with Japanese captions. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
RIVAL: Reinforcement Learning with Iterative and Adversarial Optimization for Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tianjiao Li, Mengran Yu, Chenyu Shi, Yanjun Zhao, Xiaojing Liu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qiang Zhang, Jiayin Wang
| Challenge: | Using reinforcement learning from human feedback, large language models perform poorly when applied to colloquial subtitle translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial training framework that iteratively updates the offline reward model and the online LLM to improve training outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework significantly improves upon translation baselines. |
COSIGN: Contextual Facts Guided Generation for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph completion (KGC) are limited in generality and scalability due to poor contextual facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextual facts collector and contextual facts organizer to enhance the inference ability of GM-based methods for various KGC tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance. |
Rethinking the Reversal Curse of LLMs: a Prescription from Human Knowledge Reversal (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhicong Lu, Li Jin, Peiguang Li, Yu Tian, Linhao Zhang, Sirui Wang, Guangluan Xu, Changyuan Tian, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by their aggressive sample permutation and lack a detailed understanding of the underlying reasons for the reversal curse. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances bidirectional entity correlation modeling and pairwise relationship reasoning to overcome the reversal curse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes the reversal curse by augmenting the samples with entity order-reversals and semantically preserved question-answer pairs. |
Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding requires mapping natural language instructions to precise pixel coordinates due to visually homogeneous elements and dense layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace static consistency strategies with a learnable selection mechanism that selects the optimal target by critiquing its own proposals rendered on the screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves both grounding and critiquing capabilities over 6 benchmarks. |
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Compared to standard RC tasks, dialogue reading comprehension (DRC) has raised challenges because of the complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method for dialogue reading comprehension that extracts answers from dialogues by using key-utterances-extracting methods and a Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance against previous works. |
Hanfu-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark on Cross-Temporal Cultural Understanding and Transcreation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on cultural understanding with vision-language models primarily emphasize geographic diversity, often overlooking the critical temporal dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal vision-language model that examines temporal features and cultural image transcreation. |
| Outcome: | The novel model performs better than non-experts on visual cutural understanding but falls short to human experts on cultural image transcreation task. |
You Only Need One Single Token to Refine Safety Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Excessive safety can lead to over-refusal, where models reject harmful-looking yet benign queries, severely limiting utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight training-based approach that reshapes the distributions of harmful and benign samples within the model’s decision space by using a single-token prefix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can distinguish between harmful and benign samples while keeping the model frozen. |
Harnessing Pre-Trained Neural Networks with Rules for Formality Style Transfer (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies normalize informal sentences with rules, but they introduce noise if we use them in a naive way. |
| Approach: | They propose to harness rules into a state-of-the-art neural network that is typically pretrained on massive corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to generate a state-of-the-art on a small dataset. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Automate Strategy Finding with LLM in Quant Investment (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhizhuo Kou, Holam Yu, Junyu Luo, Jingshu Peng, Xujia Li, Chengzhong Liu, Juntao Dai, Lei Chen, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate robust performance of the strategy in Chinese & US market regimes compared to established benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework leveraging Large Language Models within a risk-aware multi-agent system for automate strategy finding in quantitative finance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms all benchmarks in Chinese & US market regimes with 53.17% cumulative return on SSE50. |
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. |
| Approach: | They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. |
Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jianpeng Cheng, Devang Agrawal, Héctor Martínez Alonso, Shruti Bhargava, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Dain Kaplan, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Lin Li, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Anders Johannsen
| Challenge: | Language understanding for task-based dialog systems is often termed "dialog state tracking" (DST) whereas semantic parsing is the task of converting a single-turn utterance to a graphstructured meaning representation, DST is more complex. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dialog state tracking that incorporates semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on state-of-the-art approaches for dialog state tracking (DST) it incorporates semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. |
AMR-based Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Domain Adaptive Text Style Transfer (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text style transfer without parallel data is a promising method for learning, but in the scenario where less data is available, it may yield poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage available data to learn domain-adaptive text style transfer models . they evaluate two style transfer tasks where only limited non-parallel data is available . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models learn from the source domain to: (i) distinguish stylized information and generic content information; (ii) maximally preserve content information and (iv) adaptively transfer the styles in a domain-aware manner. |
Making Flexible Use of Subtasks: A Multiplex Interaction Network for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies aim to integrate multiple sub-tasks into a unified ABSA model but suffer from major disadvantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to make use of sub-tasks for a unified ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can work well when some sub-tasks are absent, and the interactive relations among subtasks not adequate. |
UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing query augmentation methods face knowledge update lag and hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) Existing methods face two key challenges: (1) separation of query augmented and encoding tasks, which hinders information sharing and introduces cumulative errors; (2) difficulty of selecting optimal augmentation strategy for different scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for query understanding in RAG that integrates internal and external knowledge to enhance query augmentation and encoding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional query augmentation methods in five knowledge-intensive benchmark tasks in both closed and open domain question answering. |
OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite recent progress in dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a consensus-based framework for dialog evaluation using segment act flows . they propose to crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it to be evaluated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reach the best or comparable correlation with human evaluation. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate training data with pre-trained language models have been found effective in various scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised zero-shot learning method that generates a dataset from scratch and trains a tiny task model under supervision of the synthesized dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is annotated-free and efficient, but can provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation and unreferenced text generation evaluation. |
Discovering Low-rank Subspaces for Language-agnostic Multilingual Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that pre-trained ML-LMs can achieve zero-shot cross-lingual transfer without explicit cross-linguistic supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to remove language-specific factors from multilingual embedding spaces by using a single value decomposition method with multiple monolingual corpora as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost language agnosticism without finetuning . Empirical results show that it consistently leads to improvements over existing models. |
Exploring Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bingchan Zhao, Xinyi Liu, Zhuocheng Yu, Tongchen Yang, Yifan Song, Mingyu Jin, Sujian Li, Yizhou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning models fail to capture nuanced semantics of videos . existing models generate coarse descriptions of human motions, resulting in poor quality . |
| Approach: | They construct a fine-grained human motion video captioning dataset named BoFiT and a model that generates fine-grain descriptions of human motions via prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on comprehensive metrics. |
EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) Existing cost analyses regulate only the number of sampling passes, ignoring the substantial disparities in sampling costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two complementary methods into a unified EconRL pipeline to increase pass rates under constrained sampling passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. |
InfiAgent: An Infinite-Horizon Framework for General-Purpose Autonomous Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs break down on long-horizon tasks due to unbounded context growth and accumulated errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that externalizes persistent state into a file-centric state abstraction and keeps the agent’s reasoning context strictly bounded regardless of task duration. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on DeepResearch and an 80-paper literature review show that the proposed framework maintains higher long-horizon coverage than baseline models without task-specific fine-tuning. |
Beyond the Safety Tax: Mitigating Unsafe Text-to-Image Generation via External Safety Rectification (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safety defenses typically intervene internally within the generative model, but suffer from severe concept entanglement, leading to degradation of benign generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a structurally isolated safety module that performs external, interpretable rectification without modifying the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module performs external, interpretable rectification without modifying the base model. |
Formality Style Transfer with Shared Latent Space (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for formality style transfer use neural networks for sentence generation, but the dataset for formal style transfer is considerably smaller than translation corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach for formality style transfer using shared latent space and two auxiliary losses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines in various settings, especially when limited data is available. |
Glancing Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation methods are either inferior to Transformer or require multiple decoding passes, leading to reduced speedup. |
| Approach: | They propose a Glancing Language Model (GLM) for single-pass parallel generation models and Glancing Transformer (GLAT) with only single- pass decoding, GLAT is able to generate high-quality translation with 8-15 speedup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous non-autoregressive methods on multiple language directions and is nearly comparable to Transformer. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Black-Box Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-agmented generation fail to generalize effectively in black-box scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the semantic importance of words to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest score on four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets. |
Soft-Prompting with Graph-of-Thought for Multi-modal Representation Learning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn multi-modal tasks are based on chain-of-thought . however, human thought processes are non-linear and employ dynamic adjustment and updating mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought technique that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves multi-modal representation learning in visual, visual, and audio-visual tasks and also has good domain generalization performance due to better reasoning. |
Improving Multimodal Named Entity Recognition via Entity Span Detection with Unified Multimodal Transformer (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition ignore visual context bias . NER is a key component of many information extraction tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal interaction module to generate word-aware visual representations and leverage purely text-based entity span detection as an auxiliary module to guide the final predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets. |
Explanation Graph Generation via Generative Pre-training over Synthetic Graphs (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for explanation graph generation are limited due to the large number of datasets available. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-graph generative task to pre-train a model to bridge the text-graph gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses all baseline systems with remarkable margins on ExplaGraphs and CommonsenseQA. |
GALLa: Graph Aligned Large Language Models for Improved Source Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Programming languages have rich semantics that are represented by graphs and not available from the surface form of source code. |
| Approach: | They propose to use graph neural networks and cross-modal alignment technologies to inject structural information of code into LLMs as an auxiliary task during finetuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on five code tasks with six different baseline LLMs, while incurring no cost at inference time. |
Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM’s Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models have enabled them to tackle complex tasks such as mathematics reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that modulates attention temperature dynamically to shift LLM's internal focus during reasoning, enabling a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Pass@10 by 6.78–14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks. |
Planning First, Question Second: An LLM-Guided Method for Controllable Question Generation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current CQG methods focus on difficulty control, neglecting the control of question content and assessed abilities, which are also crucial in educational QG. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-guided method PFQS which utilizes Llama 2 to generate an answer plan and then generates questions based on it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves better consistency with requirements in a zero-shot setting. |
FITAnnotator: A Flexible and Intelligent Text Annotation System (2021.naacl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce FITAnnotator, a generic web-based tool for efficient text annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic web-based tool for efficient text annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool is based on a fully modular architecture and provides three kinds of interfaces to annotate instances, evaluate annotation quality and manage the annotation task for annotators, reviewers and managers. |
CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xintong Li, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Jiuxiang Gu, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | et al., 2024) show that multimodal instruction tuning is more effective than baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal balance coefficient that enables quantitative measurement of the balance of learning . they propose auxiliary regularization on the gradient to promote updating with larger step sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than baselines in MLLM instruction tuning. |
Generating Data for Symbolic Language with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) bring performance and complexity, but they incur a large computational cost in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-based model which uses large language models to generate symbolic language data by an informative prompt and agreement-based verifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate symbolic language data with a few human demonstrations and saves a considerable amount of inference effort. |
The Proxy Presumption: From Semantic Embeddings to Valid Social Measures (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Natural Language Processing is evolving into a primary instrument for Computational Social Science . but, this transition faces a validity challenge: the “Proxy Presumption” . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to bridge the gap between semantic embeddings and valid social measures by using the Construct Validity Protocol. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between semantic embeddings and valid social measures . it reduces confounding in embeddable space and provides a standardized Validity Suite . |
ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Literature review is an indispensable step in the research process, but literature summary is challenging and time consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent with human workflow guidance for comparative literature summary . they use a human workflow to extract key elements from relevant literature and generate summaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the CoT model in several dimensions. |
CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Shiquan Yu, Ruiying Peng, Baining Zhao, Qian Zhang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing ground VLN agents struggle in aerial VLLN due to the lack of predefined navigation graphs and the exponentially expanding action space in long-horizon exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered aerial VLN agent that decomposes the long-horizon task into sub-goals with different semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvement in continuous city environments. |
Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zheyuan Zhang, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Linlu Gong, Jinchang Zhou, Zhanxin Hao, Jianxiao Jiang, Jie Cao, Huiqin Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Initial studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, but the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with real user participation remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent classroom simulation teaching framework that recognizes representative class roles and introduces a novel class control mechanism for automatic classroom teaching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can simulate dynamic learning environment for users with active teacher-student and student-studente interactions. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation. |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation via Adaptive Prefix Alignment (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks by over 3%. |
TSPO: Breaking the Double Homogenization Dilemma in Multi-turn Search Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shichao Ma, Zhiyuan Ma, Ming Yang, Xiaofan Li, Xing Wu, Jintao Du, Yu Cheng, Weiqiang Wang, Qiliang Liu, Zhengyang Zhou, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve complex tasks through iterative information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a turn-level stage-aware policy optimization approach to solve this problem . they introduce a first-occurrence latent reward mechanism to allocate partial rewards . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TSPO outperforms state-of-the-art models on Qwen2.5-3B and 7B models. |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Cai Ke, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Yifan Xiang, Lin Gui, Zhongyang Li, Baojun Wang, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation . |
SemAttack: Natural Textual Attacks via Different Semantic Spaces (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to attack pre-trained language models suffer from low success rates or fail to search efficiently in the exponentially large perturbation space. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient framework to generate natural adversarial text by constructing different semantic perturbation functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates natural adversarial texts for different languages with high success rates. |
latent-GLAT: Glancing at Latent Variables for Parallel Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in text generation have limited applications due to multimodality problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses latent variables to capture word categorical information and invoke an advanced curriculum learning technique to overcome multi-modality problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines without an autoregressive model, which further broadens the application scenarios of the parallel decoding paradigm. |
MRE-MI: A Multi-image Dataset for Multimodal Relation Extraction in Social Media Posts (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Multimodal Relation Extraction focus on single image scenarios . current approaches focus on text paired with a single image, ignoring valuable insights provided by remaining images. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated dataset that includes multi-image and single-image instances for relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves relation extraction in multi-image scenarios. |
Does DetectGPT Fully Utilize Perturbation? Bridging Selective Perturbation to Fine-tuned Contrastive Learning Detector would be Better (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shengchao Liu, Xiaoming Liu, Yichen Wang, Zehua Cheng, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Yu Lan, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect MGT from human-written texts are inadequate . existing methods are fine-tuned and zero-shot metric-based, but they can be more accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuned detector that can detect MGT from human-written texts by contrastive learning on selective perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.20% on four public datasets. |
GRASS: Gradient-based Adaptive Layer-wise Importance Sampling for Memory-efficient Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiyuan Tian, Linbo Qiao, Yu Tang, Gongqingjian Jiang, Baihui Liu, Yifu Gao, Xialin Su, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models limit expressiveness and performance . layer-wise fine-tuning methods overlook variations in layer importance across tasks and training stages, resulting in suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-based adaptive layer-wise importance sampling framework that updates only a subset of parameters to reduce memory usage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and memory usage. |
Large-Scale and Multi-Perspective Opinion Summarization with Diverse Review Subsets (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for opinion summarization are deficient in epitomizing extensive reviews and offering opinion summaries from various angles. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised opinion summarization framework that takes sentiment orientation into account and trains the summarizer to learn from sub-optimal and optimal review subsets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates pros, cons, and verdict summaries from hundreds of input reviews. |
Enhancing Pre-trained Chinese Character Representation with Word-aligned Attention (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained Chinese language models take character as the basic unit and learn representation according to character’s external contexts, ignoring the semantics expressed in the word, which is the smallest meaningful utterance in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to pool character-level attention to the word level and propose to alleviate the potential issue of segmentation error propagation by multi-source information fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on five Chinese NLP benchmark tasks against BERT, ERNIE and BERT-wwm. |
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current studies on text image translation face bottlenecks due to lack of a publicly available dataset and poor optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a text image translation model with a multimodal codebook and an OCR dataset for Chinese-English translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. |
Breaking the Ceiling of the LLM Community by Treating Token Generation as a Classification for Ensembling (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in a wide range of tasks and contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a token-level ensembling method to exploit the probability information at each generation step and to avoid early incorrect tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method breaks the existing community performance ceiling and improves on several benchmarks. |
From Pixels to Policies: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Language Models for Content-Aware Layout Design (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LaySPA equips large language models (LLMs) with explicit and interpretable spatial reasoning for content-aware graphic layout design. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that equips large language models (LLMs) with explicit spatial reasoning for content-aware graphic layout design. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LaySPA outperforms larger LLMs in structural validity and visual quality while requiring fewer annotated samples. |
Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Yi Cheng, Wenjun Hou, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning open-source LLMs are limited to text-based analysis under predefined general criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of proprietary models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluation methods in effectiveness and robustness. |
Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models: A Dynamical Systems View of Successive Paraphrasing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for understanding iterative processes and evolution over time. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply this perspective to large language models which iteratively map input text to output text and re-express meaning with linguistic variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reveals that paraphrases re-express meaning with linguistic variation limiting linguistic diversity . |
Document-level Relation Extraction with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on extracting relations from single sentence . document-level relation extraction requires a comprehension of the whole document . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based model with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (DHG) for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used datasets. |
DPEPO: Diverse Parallel Exploration Policy Optimization for LLM-based Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
JunShuo Zhang, Chengrui Huang, Feng Guo, Zihan Li, Ke Shi, Menghua Jiang, Jiguo Yu, Shuo Shang, Shen Gao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language model (LLM) agents that follow the sequential "reason-then-act" paradigm suffer from limited exploration and incomplete environmental understanding as they interact with only a single environment per step. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables an agent to interact with multiple environments simultaneously and share cross-trajectory experiences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates while maintaining comparable efficiency to strong sequential baselines. |
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
ONSEP: A Novel Online Neural-Symbolic Framework for Event Prediction Based on Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | TKGF is a technique that requires experience during testing and relying on a single short-term history. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dynamic causal rule mining and dual history augmented generation to enhance event prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvements across diverse datasets and significantly improves Hit@k. |
Pru-CoT: Towards Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Pruning Chain-of-Thought (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing heuristics fail to capture global causal logic due to rigid rules and limited search spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts the essential logical structure from reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Pru-CoT models generate more compact reasoning paths compared to models trained on verbose data. |
Federated Retrieval Augmented Generation for Multi-Product Question Answering (2025.coling-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-domain RAG-QA approaches query all domains indiscriminately or rely on rigid resource selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-product knowledge-augmented QA framework with probabilistic federated search across domains and relevant knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-product knowledge-augmented QA performance on Adobe products. |
HeteroRAG: A Heterogeneous Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Vision Language Tasks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical large vision-language models suffer from factual inaccuracies and unreliable outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
MathAgent: Adversarial Evolution of Constraint Graphs for Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to synthesising high-quality mathematical reasoning data without human priors suffer from mode collapse and limited logical complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical synthesis framework that formulates data synthesis as an unsupervised optimization problem over a constraint graph followed by semantic instantiation rather than a direct text generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms widely-used datasets on eight mathematical benchmarks. |
Scaling Reasoning, Losing Control: Evaluating Instruction Following in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning-oriented models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in mathematical reasoning, but their ability to adhere to user directives remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate instruction-following in mathematical reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model degrades in instruction adherence when generation length increases, but can partially recover obedience, despite increasing generation length. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | KB-BINDER enables few-shot in-context learning over knowledge base questions . KBQA is a difficult problem due to the heterogeneity of knowledge bases . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables few-shot in-context learning over KBQA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on GraphQA and MetaQA datasets. |
MBTI Personality Prediction for Fictional Characters Using Movie Scripts (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing NLP models cannot predict character's personality types based on text classifications . character comprehension is the cornerstone of understanding stories in psychology and education. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to predict movie character's MBTI or Big 5 personality types based on the narratives of the character. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in the task and is more accurate than random guesses. |
Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a limited number of text encoders are able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation dataset to examine embeddings' ability to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows embeddings struggle with fine-grained matching . the proposed encoder outperforms the state-of-the-art 7B model in a small sample . |
Bringing Pedagogy into Focus: Evaluating Virtual Teaching Assistants’ Question-Answering in Asynchronous Learning Environments (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing assessments rely on surface-level metrics and lack sufficient grounding in educational theory . a new framework is proposed to evaluate VTAs in asynchronous learning environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a pedagogically-oriented evaluation framework tailored to asynchronous forum discussions . they construct classifiers using expert annotations of VTA responses on a diverse set of forum posts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is rooted in learning sciences and tailored to asynchronous forum discussions. |
UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) uses the extract-then-abstract paradigm, which extracts a relatively short meta-document and then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to calculate document and keyword’s perplexity to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. |
The R-U-A-Robot Dataset: Helping Avoid Chatbot Deception by Detecting User Questions About Human or Non-Human Identity (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | We analyze 2,500 phrasings related to the intent of “Are you a robot?” and 2,500 adversarially selected utterances to determine whether systems are non-human. |
| Approach: | They analyze 2,500 phrasings related to the intent of "Are you a robot?" and 2,500 adversarially selected utterances to determine whether systems are non-human. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model and two systems fail to confirm non-human intent, and the proposed model is complex. |
Evaluating Robustness of Generative Search Engine on Adversarial Factoid Questions (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
QAEncoder: Towards Aligned Representation Learning in Question Answering Systems (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengren Wang, Qinhan Yu, Shida Wei, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Xiaoxing Wang, Simin Niu, Hao Liang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses, but the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based approach to bridge this gap by attaching document fingerprints to the embedding to estimate the expectation of potential queries. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across diverse datasets, languages, and embedding models confirm the proposed solution is simple-yet-effective with zero additional index storage, retrieval latency, training costs, or catastrophic forgetting and hallucination issues. |
Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Short Product Title Generation in Mobile E-Commerce (N19-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for short product title generation only consider textual information from long titles . MM-GAN incorporates image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual info from original long titles. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal generative adversarial network for short product title generation in E-commerce . they incorporate image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual information from original long titles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale E-commerce dataset. |
Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for process-oriented math reward models rely on manual annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the bottleneck of manual supervision in two scenarios. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
MMRA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Granularity and Multi-Image Relational Association Capabilities in Large Visual Language Models (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Siwei Wu, King Zhu, Yu Bai, Yiming Liang, Yizhi Li, Haoning Wu, Jiaheng Liu, Ruibo Liu, Xingwei Qu, Xuxin Cheng, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Current multimodal benchmarks focus on facts within individual images, but neglect associative relations among multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-image relational association task and a MMRA benchmark to evaluate LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that entity-level multi-image perception tasks pose greater challenges than image-level tasks. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use knowledge graphs to automatically label training data . but, it suffers from the wrong labeling problem because not all sentences containing two entities can express their relations in KGs . |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision approach to automatically label training instances . they integrate hierarchical information of relations into distantly supervised relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale dataset. |
Capturing Conversational Interaction for Question Answering via Global History Reasoning (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have studied history-dependent reasoning for question answering . utilizing global conversation history for enhancement is gaining interest . |
| Approach: | They propose to establish long-distance dependency among global utterances in multi-turn conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on QuAC by 1%, yielding the F1 score of 73.7%. |
JW-SVD: Bridging the Cross-Modal Mismatch in Post-Training MLLM Compression (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compression of Multimodal Large Language Models lack multimodal adaptation to preserve cross-modal synergy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns vision and language manifolds via a Joint Covariance basis and propose Global Spectrum-Aware Truncation to dynamically transfer parameter budget to the sensitive Backbone. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Llama-3-Next confirm that JW-SVD retains both text and image capabilities. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
Answering Cross-Dimensional Geometric Visual Questions by Multi-constraint Spatial Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving complex visual questions are limited in their ability to represent in a cross-dimensional space. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can answer complex visual questions using cross-dimensional reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can answer complex visual questions in 2D to 3D space with great application value. |
A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | gist-based context compression methods can achieve only slight performance loss on tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA, but it faces challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies to improve gist-based context compression in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve only slight performance loss on retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA tasks, but they face challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Variational Graph Autoencoding as Cheap Supervision for AMR Coreference Resolution (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a way to preserve the semantic meaning of a sentence in a graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a general pretraining method that leverages any general AMR corpus and even automatically parses AMR data to achieve performance gains of up to 6% absolute F1 points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on the previous state-of-the-art model by up to 11% F1. |
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on PTQ spans three primary directions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of post-training quantization failures using PTQ . they show that targeted repair can mitigate Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. |
From Knowing to Teaching: Scaffolding Pedagogical Decisions for LLM Agent (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yucheng Wang, Shen Yang, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Daniel Zhang-Li, Huiqin Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Bin Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models produce content lacking pedagogical depth when asked to generate lessons . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows teachers to select content according to pedagogical intent and sequence topics so foundations precede applications. |
| Outcome: | The framework achieves 67.8% win rate in human evaluation and 79.6% in LLM-based evaluation against eight baselines. |
Enhancing Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with BranchLoRA (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are prone to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) existing approaches rely on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LoRA framework to preserve previous instruction alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose an asymmetric tuning-freezing mechanism to mitigate parameter inefficiency . branch-specific routers are introduced to ensure optimal branch distribution over time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks on the latest MCIT benchmarks. |
Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Daliang Li, Ankit Singh Rawat, Manzil Zaheer, Xin Wang, Michal Lukasik, Andreas Veit, Felix Yu, Sanjiv Kumar
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing due to the massive amounts of world knowledge they memorize during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject counterfactual and irrelevant contexts into standard supervised datasets to strengthen both controllability and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves controllability and robustness across model architectures and sizes. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
EvoRoute: Experience-Driven Self-Routing LLM Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EvoRoute is a self-evolving model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GAIA and BrowseComp+ show that EvoRoute reduces execution cost and latency by over 70%. |
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MetaLadder: Ascending Mathematical Solution Quality via Analogical-Problem Reasoning Transfer (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current paradigms generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard CoT-based methods on mathematical benchmarks and significantly improves their reasoning accuracy. |
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement . |
Task-Stratified Knowledge Scaling Laws for Post-Training Quantized Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws focus on general performance, overlooking crucial fine-grained factors and how quantization differentially impacts diverse knowledge capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies model size, bit-width, and fine-grained factors into memorization, application, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows strong fit and cross-architecture consistency on 293 different PTQ configurations. |
Disentangling Task Relations for Few-shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Hierarchical Task Clustering (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Few-Shot Text Classification are limited by their global knowledge-shared mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised hierarchical task clustering method to address task heterogeneity . they use prior knowledge from historical tasks to leverage prior knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn a classifier efficiently with few examples . it disentangles the underlying relations between tasks to improve interpretability . |
Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-utterance conditional VAE to estimate posterior probability distribution of latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features from past and future sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
TableEval: A Real-World Benchmark for Complex, Multilingual, and Multi-Structured Table Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing TableQA benchmarks focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage . current benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture cross-lingual variability . |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based TableQA benchmark to evaluate LLMs on real-world tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they achieve high agreement with human judgment . the proposed framework improves on the alignment between model responses and reference answers . |
Born Pragmatic, Trained to Hallucinate? Quantifying the Origins of Contextual Bias in LLMs via the PaCE Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at capturing communicative intent, but they have a side effect: pragmatic hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to quantify the impact of pragmatic hallucination on large language models . they propose RLHF and SFT to induce a strong tendency for pragmatic over-attribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting pragmatic hallucinations . the evaluations show that current alignment paradigms lack precise control over pragmatic boundaries . |
Uncertainty Unveiled: Can Exposure to More In-context Examples Mitigate Uncertainty for Large Language Models? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in handling long sequences have unlocked new possibilities for long-context in-contact learning (ICL). |
| Approach: | They investigate how increased examples influence predictive uncertainty . they quantify uncertainty across different “shot” configurations and focus on EU . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces uncertainty in simple and complex tasks by injecting task-specific knowledge. |
PSP: Pre-trained Soft Prompts for Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Towards Efficient and Effective Diffusion Language Model Inference via Semantic-Aware Adaptive Denoising (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing acceleration works cannot accurately detect semantically stabilized tokens and then skip computation, leading to sub-optimal speedup in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware adaptive denoising framework that encodes scalar confidence scores into an evolution-awful feature vector and clusters vectors proactively and adaptively identify semantically converged tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA competitor in speed and quality . it can detect semantically stabilized tokens and skip computation, resulting in sub-optimal speedup . |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialog system models require extensive human annotations and are difficult to generalize to different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses pre-trained language to model each speaker separately . it can be generalized to more challenging, non-collaborative tasks such as persuasion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets: CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. |
SOM-NCSCM : An Efficient Neural Chinese Sentence Compression Model Enhanced with Self-Organizing Map (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sentence Compression (SC) is an important natural language processing task . it aims to shorten sentences while preserving the original meanings of the words . improvements on Chinese SC models are still lacking due to several difficulties . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural Chinese SC model enhanced with a Self-Organizing Map from Chinese colloquial sentences from a real-life question answering system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a promising F1 score of 89.655 and BLEU4 score of 70.116 . it improves the performance of the whole neural Chinese SC model in a valid manner . |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xi Wang, Songlei Jian, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ji, Ma Jun, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Feilong Bao, null Wangbaosheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-aligned content with a “jailbreak prompt” are inefficient and repetitive, causing inefficiency and a lack of experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates past attack experiences to aid current jailbreak attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both attack effectiveness and efficiency compared to the current black-box jailbreak method. |
UTC-IE: A Unified Token-pair Classification Architecture for Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Information Extraction (IE) tasks have been solved with different models because of their output structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Unified Token-pair Classification architecture for Information Extraction that introduces Plusformer on top of the token-pear feature matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms task-specific and unified models on all tasks in 10 datasets and achieves better results on 2 joint IE datasets. |
from Benign import Toxic: Jailbreaking the Language Model via Adversarial Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have exposed the risk of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating harmful content by jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits AdVersArial meTAphoR to induce LLMs to calibrate harmful metaphors for jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can successfully jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging the AdVersArial meTAphoR (AVATAR) framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rate across multiple advanced LLMs. |
URO-Bench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for End-to-End Spoken Dialogue Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a lack of comprehensive evaluations for SDMs in speech-to-speech (S2S) scenarios is a major challenge for end-to end spoken dialogue models. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide an extensive evaluation framework for end-to-end spoken dialogue models (SDMs) that includes both cognitive dimensions and paralinguistic cues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is divided into two difficulty levels: basic track and pro track, each comprising 20 test sets, evaluating the spoken dialogue model’s abilities in U**nderstanding, **R**easoning, and **O**ral conversation. |
Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, Qinyu Chen, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Kezhao Huang, Xingkai Yu, Zhewen Hao, Han Zhang, Yu-Kun Li, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but lacks knowledge lookup primitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional memory instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE) they propose 'u-shaped scaling law' that identifies optimal balance between MoE experts and DSE memory . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms an iso-parameter and isoFLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks and is infrastructure-efficient. |
Multi-Granularity Fusion Text Semantic Matching Based on WoBERT (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-matching methods struggle with semantic nuances in short texts . a novel approach to improve text semantic matching is being developed . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity fusion model that harnesses a pre-trained language model to capture text semantic nuances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese short text matching datasets compared to traditional methods . the proposed model captures individual text semantic nuances and improves accuracy . |
GuessArena: Guess Who I Am? A Self-Adaptive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Domain-Specific Knowledge and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks and standardized evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive evaluation framework that integrates dynamic domain knowledge modeling with progressive reasoning assessment to improve evaluation fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework distinguishes LLMs in terms of domain knowledge coverage and reasoning chain completeness. |
Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In traditional face-to-face therapy, the assessment of therapeutic alliance is not directly translated to text-based settings. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic approach to understand the development of therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling by using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach demonstrates that the framework is effective in identifying the therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling. |
COAST: Enhancing the Code Debugging Ability of LLMs through Communicative Agent Based Data Synthesis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqing Yang, Hanbin Wang, Zhenghao Liu, Xinze Li, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Minghe Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Ge Yu
| Challenge: | Existing code debugging benchmarks focus on the Code Repair stage of the code generation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the debugging abilities of large language models by emulating the human debug process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-curated and GPT-4-generated training data, enabling 7B-scale LLMs to achieve comparable debugging performance to GPT-3.5. |
Towards Mitigating Modality Bias in Vision-Language Models for Temporal Action Localization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models overemphasize linguistic priors, leading to modality bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language aggregation framework that mitigates modality bias in TAL by preserving vision as the dominant signal while adaptively exploiting language only when beneficial. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on THUMOS14 show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 3.2% mAP. |
Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function. |
DiffER: Diffusion Entity-Relation Modeling for Reversal Curse in Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language models exhibit unidirectional behavior when processing bidirectional relationships . authors propose a solution to alleviate the reversal curse in Diffusion LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that addresses the "reversal curse" of bidirectional behavior in large language models . they propose 'entity-aware training' and balanced data construction to alleviate asymmetry and missing relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates the "reversal curse" in Diffusion LLMs . the proposed model employs whole-entity masking to mitigate entity fragmentation . |
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states . |
Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. |
Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Temporal Reasoning Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dynamic early-exit methods rely on single-step confidence signals . existing approaches are unreliable for detecting reasoning convergence in multi-step settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for efficient test-time scaling that determines when to terminate reasoning based on temporal aggregation of multi-step evidence rather than instantaneous signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TRACE reduces reasoning token usage by 25% on average while maintaining accuracy within 1–2% of full-length reasoning. |
EFSA: Towards Event-Level Financial Sentiment Analysis (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a large-scale Chinese dataset contains 12,160 news articles and 13,725 quintuples . a four-hop Chain-of-Thought LLM-based approach is devised for this task . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend financial sentiment analysis to event-level since events usually serve as the subject of the sentiment in financial text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the current state-of-the-art on a large-scale Chinese dataset. |
API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Minghao Li, Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Feifan Song, Hangyu Li, Haiyang Yu, Zhoujun Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools and an annotation system for 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the effectiveness of existing LLMs by analyzing 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transcribe contextual named entities (NEs) treat entities as tokens and generate them token-by-token, which may result in incomplete transcriptions of entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that can copy entities from the NE dictionary and reduce errors during entity transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism can copy entities from the NE dictionary, reducing errors during entity transcription, ensuring the completeness of the entity. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Heyang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. |
Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level perturbation-based adversarial ATtack that generates adversarials through phrase- level perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of natural language processing models by reducing the need for word-level perturbations and preserving the fluency and grammaticality of the samples. |
Knowledge Fusion By Evolving Weights of Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results on mainstream language models show that Evolver outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by large margins due to the high training costs of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate multiple models from diverse training scenarios into a unified model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on mainstream language models by large margins. |
Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association (2024.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing information retrieval datasets cannot capture abstract semantic associations well. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that retrieves relevant plots from the book for a query using a labeled dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. |
Hierarchical Bi-Directional Self-Attention Networks for Paper Review Rating Recommendation (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for review rating prediction ignore hierarchies among data . paper review rating predictions are important for improving paper review process . |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical bi-directional self-attention Network framework for paper review rating prediction and recommendation . they leverage hierarchical structure of paper reviews with three levels of encoders . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be used to make an effective decision-making tool for the academic paper review process. |
Contextual Text Style Transfer (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text style transfer are limited by the lack of parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to translate a sentence into a desired style with its surrounding context taken into account. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across style accuracy, content preservation and contextual consistency metrics. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion from Pretrained Language Models with Knowledge Constraints (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual knowledge graph completion do not align with mKGC tasks because of their English-centric bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pretrained language models to solve queries in different languages by reasoning a tail entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous SOTA on Hits@1 and Hits @10 by 12.32% and 16.03% on public datasets. |
Let the Expert Stick to His Last: Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning for Sparse Architectural Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for dense-architecture LLMs are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-specialized fine-tuning method that tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses full-parameter fine-tuning. |
Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current AST methods struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that converts singing recordings into note sequences for automatic annotation of singing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets. |
Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand course concepts in MOOCs suffer from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a boundary search method to search for new concepts via external knowledge base and then use heterogeneous features to verify the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the datasets from Coursera and XuetangX. |
A Transition-based Method for Complex Question Understanding (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on complex question understanding does not model intermediate states and does not provide step-wise information. |
| Approach: | They propose a transition-based method where a decider predicts a sequence of actions to build the graph node-by-node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method parses complex questions to QDMR using atomic operators . it has transparent and human-readable intermediate results, showing improved interpretability . |
A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases (KBs) can explicitly facilitate the QA process. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical reasoning model pretraining NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals, to enhance numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zelin Tan, Hejia Geng, Xiaohang Yu, Mulei Zhang, Guancheng Wan, Yifan Zhou, Qiang He, Xiangyuan Xue, Heng Zhou, Yutao Fan, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zaibin Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Chen Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Philip Torr, Lei Bai
| Challenge: | elucidating scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact during pre-training . they find that large models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws offer practical guidance for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training. |
MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone significant advances in the past year . traditional MM models incur substantial computational costs, especially when trained from scratch . |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy encompassing 126 MM-LLMs and summarize key training recipes to enhance their potency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models preserve the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs and empower diverse range of MM tasks. |
Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modeling (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Zhaobo Wang, Junfei Cheng, Dan Yu, Zerui Huang, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Chen Luo, Yanming Zhu, Bo Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs focus on connecting intentions but lacks the ability to model the relationships between different intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically generate an intention knowledge graph, capturing connections between user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and shows its utility. |
MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ruoran Li, Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Shitong Duan, Xiang Li, Wenxin Xiang, Chonghua Liao, Xudong Guo, Yongbin Li, Jinli Suo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-horizon agents introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent’s overarching task objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm which enables agents to autonomously manage their memory during interaction with environment and selectively retain crucial information. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline while preserving task performance. |
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks. |
Pre-train and Plug-in: Flexible Conditional Text Generation with Variational Auto-Encoders (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing conditional generation models cannot handle emerging conditions due to their joint end-to-end learning fashion. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conditional text generation that decouples the text generation module from the condition representation module to allow "one-to-many" conditional generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples the text generation module from the condition representation module to allow “one-to-many” conditional generation. |
Contrastive Bootstrapping for Label Refinement (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained classification categorize texts into coarse-gritty classes, but they are suboptimal in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight contrastive clustering-based bootstrapping method to iteratively refine the labels of passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on NYT and 20News datasets. |
CultureBank: An Online Community-Driven Knowledge Base Towards Culturally Aware Language Technologies (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CultureBank is a knowledge base built upon users’ self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. |
| Approach: | They construct a pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online communities on a massive scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves cultural awareness of language models by evaluating them on two cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. |
Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot learning are based on labeled examples, but they are non-trivial . few-sshot learning is challenging due to the imbalance in the amount of data between the source and target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based methods for intent classification and slot filling tasks . they use a batch-softmax objective to learn similar contextualized representations for spans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous systems on the CLINC and SNIPS benchmarks. |
MaP: A Matrix-based Prediction Approach to Improve Span Extraction in Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict the start and end positions of answer spans generate two probability vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends the probability vector to a probability matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on SQuAD 1.1 and three other question answering benchmarks. |
Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zeping Li, Guancheng Wan, Keyang Chen, Yu Chen, Yiwen Zhao, Philip Torr, Guangnan Ye, Zhenfei Yin, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Recent studies have applied Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents in financial stock market simulations to test if micro-level behaviors aggregate into macro-level phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose four alignment metrics and use Mann–Whitney U tests to compare agents’ style-switching behavior with financial theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is only partially consistent with financial theory. |
HopRAG: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Logic-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional retrieval systems focus on lexical or semantic similarity rather than logical relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RAG framework that augments retrieval with logical reasoning . hopRAG uses a retrieve-reason-prune mechanism to explore multi-hop neighbors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional retrieval systems and state-of-the-art benchmarks on multi-hop QA tasks. |
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Parallel and Sequential Inference Scaling via Aggregation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models achieve substantial gains with test-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They introduce a supervised fine-tuning paradigm where models synthesize multiple draft responses into a single, refined answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models outperform baseline models while eliminating external guidance. |
Representation Alignment and Adversarial Networks for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved dependency parsing accuracy in resource-rich languages . however, the accuracy drops sharply when the model is transferred to low-resource language . |
| Approach: | They propose a representation alignment and adversarial model to filter out useful knowledge from rich-resource language and ignore useless ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the benchmark datasets by 1.37 LAS and 1.34 UAS. |
ISR: Self-Refining Referring Expressions for Entity Grounding (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity grounding is a crucial task in the construction of multimodal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel scheme to enhance the multimodal large language model's capability to generate high quality REs for the given entities as explicit contextual clues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses other methods in entity grounding, highlighting its effectiveness, robustness and potential for broader applications. |
AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yun He, Wenzhe Li, Hejia Zhang, Songlin Li, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla, Yuanhao Xiong, Nanshu Wang, Xiaoliang Peng, Beibin Li, Shengjie Bi, Shishir G Patil, Qi Qi, Shengyu Feng, Julian Katz-Samuels, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hunter Lang, Yue Yu, Yundi Qian, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Licheng Yu, Amine Benhalloum, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Manaal Faruqui
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF) remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following abilities of large language models, achieving a 6.7% gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. |
LlmFixer: Fix the Helpfulness of Defensive Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Several defense strategies have been introduced to defend against jailbreak attacks, but these strategies weakened the usefulness of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that acts on large language models equipped with any defense strategy to recover their usefulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used on large language models to recover their usefulness without updating the parameters of a defensive large language model. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications. |
LLMs Can Also Do Well! Breaking Barriers in Semantic Role Labeling via Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a crucial task of natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose to equip LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation and self-correction mechanisms to enable SRL to perform better in Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in Chinese and English on three widely-used benchmarks. |
TypeSQL: Knowledge-Based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation (N18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing systems that can understand natural language questions and generate corresponding SQL queries are not able to do this. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which formats the problem as a slot filling task in a more reasonable way and utilizes type information to better understand rare entities and numbers in the questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the prior art on the WikiSQL dataset and can reach 82.6% accuracy, a 17.5% improvement compared to the previous content-sensitive model. |
Leveraging BERT and TFIDF Features for Short Text Clustering via Alignment-Promoting Co-Training (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing clustering methods rely on keyword information, but they lack this information. |
| Approach: | They propose a CO**-**T**raining **C**lustering framework to make use of BERT and TFIDF features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing SOTA methods on eight datasets. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing scripts for everyday tasks are presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. |
| Approach: | They propose to use loosely aligned videos to train a non-sequential graph script induction task by using a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% . it can predict future steps given a partial step sequence and generate explicit graph scripts . |
Situated Embedding Models for Context-Aware Dense Retrieval (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing embedding models are not well-equipped to encode situated context effectively, i.e., situating a chunk’s meaning within its context. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent short chunks in a way that is conditioned on a broader context window to enhance retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models on a book-plot retrieval dataset. |
Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications . recent defenses rely on supervised fine-tuning with benign and malicious labels . position bias arises when benign content placed later in a prompt is rejected at much higher rates . |
| Approach: | They analyze three recurring shortcut behaviors induced by supervised fine-tuning . position bias arises when benign content placed later in a prompt is rejected . token trigger bias occurs when strings common in attack data raise rejection probability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overrides intended logic when adversarial instructions appear . the proposed model has low rejection rates but narrow correlations in defense data . |
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict slots and their values do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models’ zero-shot capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a QA-driven slot filling model which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by over 5% on the SNIPS benchmark. |
Cooperative Self-training of Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models provide high-quality contextualized word embeddings, but training question answering models requires large amounts of annotated data for specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatically generating more non-trivial question-answer pairs to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretrained language models and transfer learning approaches on standard question-answering benchmarks. |
Unsolvable Problem Detection: Robust Understanding Evaluation for Large Multimodal Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Yixuan Li, Hai Helen Li, Ziwei Liu, Kiyoharu Aizawa
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is widely used to assess the understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a task to evaluate the robust understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) they introduce a benchmark to assess performance across various ability dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withhold answers when encountering unsolvable problems of MCQA, proving it understands the answer. |
Type-Aware Decomposed Framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) methods can detect entity spans and classify them into pre-defined categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a type-aware decomposed framework to filter out false spans . they propose 'type-against-type' learning strategy to construct more accurate prototypes based on type names as references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields state-of-the-art on several benchmarks. |
Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wei-Chieh Huang, Henry Peng Zou, Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Yangning Li, Angelo Zangari, Jizhou Guo, Chunyu Miao, Liancheng Fang, Langzhou He, Yinghui Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing deep research frameworks lack adequate evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with open-domain evaluation and a stage-wise safety benchmark to address this oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves defense success rates by 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. |
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Syntactic structures are crucial for capturing aspect-opinion relationships . syntactically based models struggle with linguistic complexities . |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic-opinion-sentiment reasoning framework that leverages syntaktic information to improve ABSA performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ABSA performance, though smaller LLMs exhibit weaker performance. |
Separate the Wheat from the Chaff: Winnowing Down Divergent Views in Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) lack robustness in knowledge-intensive tasks due to noisy or irrelevant retrieved data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate-based RAG framework that integrates external knowledge sources into large language models to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is unsupervised and leverages pretrained LLMs without fine-tuning, making it easily adaptable to various tasks. |
Evaluating Generalization Capability of Language Models across Abductive, Deductive and Inductive Logical Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research in language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on many natural language tasks, yet to what extent LMs possess the capability of generalizing to unseen logical rules remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to assess the generalization capabilities of LMs on ADI reasoning to assess their generalization abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that LMs perform poorly on ADI reasoning tasks and lacks generalization capabilities. |
The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yueheng Mao, Min Yu, Gengwang Li, Jianguo Jiang, Gang Li, Meng Zhang, Zhen Xu, Weiqing Huang, Ming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box-based framework that captures stubborn hallucinations by integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms white-box methods and reduces computational overhead by over 90%. |
Dynamic Guided and Domain Applicable Safeguards for Enhanced Security in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defense methods struggle with two key issues: inadequate defense capabilities and over-defensiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agents-based framework that leverages accurate external information to provide an unbiased summary of user intentions and safety response guidance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on popular jailbreak attacks and benign datasets show that the proposed framework can enhance LLM's robustness against jailbreaks without compromising its general functionality. |
JPU: Bridging Jailbreak Defense and Unlearning via On-Policy Path Rectification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to diverse jailbreak attacks despite extensive safety alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to rectify dynamic jailbreak paths towards safety anchors by dynamically mining on-policy adversarial samples to expose vulnerabilities and identify jailbreak path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves jailbreak resistance against dynamic attacks while maintaining its utility. |
Answering Complex Geographic Questions by Adaptive Reasoning with Visual Context and External Commonsense Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image is proposed . the task requires identifying the objects in the image and understanding the background context . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image . they analyze the image and describe its fine-grained content by text and keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to answer geographic reasoning questions based on an image . it can be applied to a large-scale dataset with 41,329 samples . |
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Standard RALMs often neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to improve robustness of RALMs by generating sequential reading notes for each retrieved document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard RALMs on four open-domain QA benchmarks. |
MGCL: Multi-Granularity Clue Learning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction via Cross-Grained Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional methods often rely on coarse-grained clause-level annotations, which overlook valuable fine-grain clues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures fine-grained clues from a weakly-supervised perspective efficiently by using a teacher model to give sub-clause clues without needing fine-grain annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering improved interpretability. |
Counterfactual reasoning: Testing language models’ understanding of hypothetical scenarios (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing language models have demonstrated remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains unclear to what extent they are consequences of correlation with linguistic heuristics versus robust reasoning about causal relations grounded on understanding of world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to test language models with counterfactual conditionals to test their ability to distinguish hypothetical scenarios from reality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overrides real-world knowledge in counterfactual scenarios, but most models are driven by lexical cues. |
VenusFactory: An Integrated System for Protein Engineering with Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao, Wu Banghao, Mingchen Li, Ruilin Wang, Lingrong Zhang, Huiqun Yu, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong, Bingxin Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained protein language models have been used in protein engineering, but their adoption is limited due to data collection, task benchmarking, and application challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed engine integrates biological data retrieval, task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
SALAD-Bench: A Hierarchical and Comprehensive Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Tree-Instruct: A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the importance of data complexity as a crucial metric, but the impact of complexity remains relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to add a specified number of nodes to instructions’ semantic trees to enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms diverse yet complex instructions under the same token budget and can control the difficulty level of modified instructions. |
Speed Up Your Code: Progressive Code Acceleration Through Bidirectional Tree Editing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Longhui Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Meishan Zhang, GaoXiong Cao, Ensheng Shi, Mayuchi Mayuchi, Jun Yu, Honghai Liu, Jing Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training methods, such as direct instruction fine-tuning, overlook hierarchical relationships among acceleration patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm that uses bidirectional tree editing and progressive code acceleration learning to improve LLMs’ CA capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm outperforms prompt-enhanced GPT-4 and current training-based methods on average across five programming languages. |
StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt tuning have shown that language models can be effective few-shot learners with prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by prompt initialization. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.97% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 1.92 on average. |
Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Renhe Jiang, Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yangning Li, Liancheng Fang, Zhen Wang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to assist with driving decisions, but they face limitations in perception and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs and their applications . they analyze agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM agents engage with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human intervention and improves safety and efficiency. |
Activation-Guided Local Editing for Jailbreaking Attacks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited and produce incoherent or unreadable inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that performs a one-shot, scenario-based generation of context and rephrases the original malicious query to obscure its harmful intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate, with gains of up to 37.74% over the strongest baseline, and excellent transferability to black-box and large-scale models. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation. |
HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | HERO is a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning that encodes multimodal inputs in a hierarchical structure and uses Masked Language Modeling and Masked Frame Modeling to train models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks over text-based video/video-moment retrieval, video question answering (QA), Video-and-language Inference and video Captioning tasks across different domains. |
Can Large Language Models Act as Ensembler for Multi-GNNs? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing graph neural networks lack the inherent semantic understanding capability of rich textual attributes, limiting their effectiveness in applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates multiple GNNs and LLMs to provide an ensemble for multi-GNNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of semantic understanding of graph structures and graph structures. |
Quantized but Deceptive? A Multi-Dimensional Truthfulness Evaluation of Quantized LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models in resource-constrained environments . but impact on truthfulness remains largely unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess the truthfulness of quantized large language models . they find quantized models retain internally truthful representations but produce false outputs . |
| Outcome: | The framework assesses the truthfulness of quantized models across three dimensions . it finds that quantized model models retain internally truthful representations but are more susceptible to false outputs . |
Safety Alignment via Constrained Knowledge Unlearning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zesheng Shi, Yucheng Zhou, Jing Li, Yuxin Jin, Yu Li, Daojing He, Fangming Liu, Saleh Alharbi, Jun Yu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms have not fully deleted harmful knowledge in large language models (LLMs) Existing methods to address safety alignment have not completely deleted harmful information in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety alignment strategy that uses scoring neurons to identify useful knowledge in LLMs and pruning the gradients of neurons in U to preserve beneficial information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves model safety while maintaining utility compared to existing methods. |
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step. |
Attention Calibration for Transformer in Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Attention mechanisms have been ubiquitous in neural machine translation (NMT) however, many studies doubt whether highlyattended inputs have a large impact on the model outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a mask perturbation model that automatically evaluates each input’s contribution to the model outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more uniform at lower layers while more concentrated on the specific inputs at higher layers. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuofeng Li, Yi Lu, Dongfu Jiang, Haoxiang Zhang, Yuyang Bai, Chuan Li, Yu Wang, Shuiwang Ji, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. |
| Approach: | They propose a peer review benchmarking tool based on paper-specific rubrics and a rubric-guided framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines with stronger/larger backbones in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. |
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing joint models only use training procedure to determine the implicit correlation between intents and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two public multi-intent datasets. |
MSMO: Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal summarization can improve user satisfaction for informativeness of summaries by using information in visual modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate text and select the most relevant image from the multimodal input and a novel multimodal automatic evaluation method to evaluate multimodal outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves user satisfaction by 12.4% compared to the current system . |
Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning Across Heterogeneous Languages (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing mPLM-based methods focus on designing costly model pre-training while ignoring equally crucial downstream adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta graph learning method that extracts meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences to learn to cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn to cross-lingual transfer by extracting meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences (tasks) it can also capture intrinsic language relationships to explicitly guide cross-linguistic transfer. |
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Yu Zi Wei, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks. |
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Attention-based Span-specific and Contextual Semantic Representations (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods treat each span token equally important, ignoring significant features. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based joint extraction framework with attention-based semantic representations that utilizes span-specific and contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ACE2005, CoNLL2004 and ADE. |
TextBox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei, Alessandro Stolfo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guangtao Zeng, Antoine Bosselut, Mrinmaya Sachan
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretation of language models for multi-step reasoning tasks by introducing a new probing approach that recovers the reasoning tree from the model’s attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it, and detects the information from the model’s attention patterns for most examples. |
Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning (2022.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical study shows superiority of proposed method over time-tested knowledge-driven and data-driven methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive knowledge graph that unifies expert rules and relational facts as the substrate of machine learning and reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show the proposed method superior to time-tested methods . the proposed model can perform both learning and reasoning with labeled data . |
An Empirical Analysis on Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown impressive generalization ability on vision and language tasks, but their spatial understanding is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They construct a VQA dataset to analyze LMMs' spatial reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
UniCreative: Unifying Long-form Logic and Short-form Sparkle via Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaolong Wei, Zerun Zhu, Simin Niu, Xingyu Zhang, Peiying Yu, Changxuan Xiao, Yuchen Li, Jicheng Yang, Zhejun Zhao, Chong Meng, Long Xia, Daiting Shi
| Challenge: | Existing alignment paradigms for creative writing use static reward signals and supervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reward model that synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns models with human preferences across content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. |
How Chain-of-Thought Works? Tracing Information Flow from Decoding, Projection, and Activation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances model reasoning, yet its internal mechanisms remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They reversely traced information flow across decoding, projection, and activation phases and found that CoT may serve as a decoding space pruner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to design more efficient and robust prompts. |
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks. |
Forward-Backward Reasoning in Large Language Models for Mathematical Verification (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on six standard mathematical data sets and three LLMs show that FOBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine forward and backward reasoning to verify candidate answers . they propose to use a template to mask a number and ask the LLM to answer a backward question . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on mathematical data show that proposed backward reasoning outperforms Self-Consistency. |
Towards Text-Image Interleaved Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Zhang, Ziqi Dai, Yongqi Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Meishan Zhang, Jun Yu, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal information retrieval models rely on single-image inputs . current models use a dense retrieval paradigm, but this approach is not effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a text-image interleaved retrieval task where query and document are interleaves . they adapt off-the-shelf retrievers and build a dense baseline by interleaded multimodal large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant improvements over the baseline by substantially fewer visual tokens. |
Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explained to what extent LLMs extract conflicting knowledge from the provided text, but they neglect the necessity to reason with conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset for knowledge conflict resolution examination in the form of question answering that divides reasoning with conflicting knowledge into three levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset enables analysis of reasoning with conflicting knowledge in the form of question answering. |
Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that label slots and detect intent do not preserve hierarchical relationship between words, slots, and intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based neural network model which performs slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models and existing models on real-world datasets. |
Chinese Spoken Named Entity Recognition in Real-world Scenarios: Dataset and Approaches (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current Chinese Spoken NER datasets are laboratory-controlled and are limited in topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese Spoken NER datasets to extract entities from speech to help voice assistants better grasp the intent behind user's questions and instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on self-training-asr and mapping then distilling, and even compared with GPT4.0, they achieve better results. |
CLGC: A Corpus for Chinese Literary Grace Evaluation (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Literature grace is a key element of the style and quality of articles in China. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a Chinese literary grace corpus with 10,000 texts and 1.85 million tokens and build a literary grace evaluation task to assess the literary grace level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 79.71% on the weighted average F1-score. |
Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity linking models have been successful in capturing semantic features, but the NIL prediction problem has not been addressed. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity linking dataset that categorizes mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset categorizes mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase categories and ensures the presence of mentions by human annotation and entity masking. |
A Cause-Effect Look at Alleviating Hallucination of Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems have demonstrated impressive performance conducting fluent and natural-sounding conversations, but they are plagued by the Knowledge Hallucination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exploits the dialogue-knowledge interaction to reduce hallucination by using external knowledge resources to generate more informative responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination without disrupting other dialogue performance while keeping adaptive to different generation models. |
CTAL: Pre-training Cross-modal Transformer for Audio-and-Language Representations (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing audio-language task-specific predictive approaches focus on building complicated late-fusion mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal transformer for audio-and-language that learns inter-modal connections between audio and language through two proxy tasks on a large amount of audio- and-language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on multiple audio-and-language tasks and can be used in fine-tuning phase. |
SetConv: A New Approach for Learning from Imbalanced Data (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification are biased towards the majority class when the Imbalance Ratio (IR) is high. |
| Approach: | They propose a set convolution operation and an episodic training strategy to extract a single representative for each class, so that classifiers can later be trained on a balanced class distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is permutation-invariant despite the order of inputs and shows superiority on multiple large-scale benchmark text datasets. |
Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality. |
InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can attain professional-level proficiency in specific domains through fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal LLM that aligns molecular structures with natural language via an instruction-tuning approach. |
| Outcome: | InstructMol surpasses existing models and reduces the gap with specialists in drug discovery tasks. |
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Circular Convolution (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity for fine-tuning large foundation models, but its intrinsic low-rank characteristic may limit its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptive method that uses low-ranked matrices to represent weight changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces trainable parameters and mitigates heavy memory consumption associated with full delta matrices by sequentially multiplying mathbf A and mathbb B with the activation. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |
SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods fail to adapt to the diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for prioritizing rules over user instructions to minimize misalignments in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes misalignments and adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately. |