Papers by Yu Su
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihang Wang, Xu Huang, Bowen Tian, Yueyang Su, Lei Yu, Huaming Liao, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing context by removing redundant tokens are inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses information bottleneck theory to compress context . they propose to remove redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art . |
Lost in Decomposition: Analyzing and Mitigating the Limitations of Long Context Methods via Context Dependency (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing workflow-based long context methods do not perform well on specific datasets . performance degradation is associated with the indiscriminate application of long context models . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free adaptive routing strategy to improve long context large language models' robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be generalized to all types of datasets, but performance degradation is a concern. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Generating Commonsense Reasoning Questions with Controllable Complexity through Multi-step Structural Composition (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work mainly learns to map text into questions, lacking a mechanism to control results with desired complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel controllable framework to generate QGs with desired complexity using contextual and commonsense clues from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate complex questions with desired complexity levels. |
Self-Taught Agentic Long Context Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Yufan Zhuang, Xiaodong Yu, Jialian Wu, Ximeng Sun, Ze Wang, Jiang Liu, Yusheng Su, Jingbo Shang, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments across seven long-context tasks demonstrate that AgenticLU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-consumer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance an LLM's understanding of long-context questions by integrating targeted self-clarification with contextual grounding within an agentic workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-context LLMs in seven long-constitut tasks. |
MenatQA: A New Dataset for Testing the Temporal Comprehension and Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown nearly saturated performance on many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct multiple sensitive factors time QA which encompasses three temporal factors . they test current mainstream LLMs with different parameter sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates three temporal factors with 2,853 samples . the results show that LLMs fall behind smaller models on these factors . |
ReasonBERT: Pre-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods only harvest learning signals from local contexts of naturally occurring texts . ReasonBert provides a method for reasoning over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments language models with the ability to reason over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves sample efficiency over strong baselines. |
Self-Consistency Boosts Calibration for Math Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for math reasoning tasks use semantic parsing or AST decoding, but performance can degrade dramatically even with slight changes to the questions. |
| Approach: | They propose three calibration methods based on self-consistency for math reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods bridge model confidence and accuracy better than existing methods based on p(True) or logit. |
Leveraging Dependency Forest for Neural Medical Relation Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical relation extraction use dependency syntax as a source of features. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract relational information from medical literature by using dependency forests. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard tree-based methods in the medical domain. |
Unsupervised Dual Paraphrasing for Two-stage Semantic Parsing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing frameworks rely on nontrivial human labor to generate canonical utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses an unsupervised paraphrase model to parse canonical utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and compatible with supervised training. |
Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis (2020.tacl-1)
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Jacob Andreas, John Bufe, David Burkett, Charles Chen, Josh Clausman, Jean Crawford, Kate Crim, Jordan DeLoach, Leah Dorner, Jason Eisner, Hao Fang, Alan Guo, David Hall, Kristin Hayes, Kellie Hill, Diana Ho, Wendy Iwaszuk, Smriti Jha, Dan Klein, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Theo Lanman, Percy Liang, Christopher H. Lin, Ilya Lintsbakh, Andy McGovern, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Adam Pauls, Dmitrij Petters, Brent Read, Dan Roth, Subhro Roy, Jesse Rusak, Beth Short, Div Slomin, Ben Snyder, Stephon Striplin, Yu Su, Zachary Tellman, Sam Thomson, Andrei Vorobev, Izabela Witoszko, Jason Wolfe, Abby Wray, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Zotov
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue represent dialogue state as a dataflow graph . microsoft's SMCalFlow dataset features complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataflow graph-based dialogue agent that maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves representability and predictability in natural dialogues . it uses dataflow graphs and metacomputation to map user intents to a program . |
I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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 . |
Detecting Emotional Incongruity of Sarcasm by Commonsense Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection lack commonsense inferential ability when faced with complex situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning framework for sarcasm detection based on commonsensense augmentation to supplement commonsence knowledge and infer the incongruity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to detect sarcasm in five datasets and is robust to complex scenarios. |
Cross-Lingual Cross-Platform Rumor Verification Pivoting on Multimedia Content (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | rumors with multimedia content are becoming more and more common on social networks . a new feature set is proposed to verify rumors pivoting on multimedia content . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimedia content to find external information on social media platforms . they propose to leverage semantic similarity between rumors and external information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on social networks . it leverages semantic similarity between rumors and external information . |
Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Beta Distribution Guided Aspect-aware Graph for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis with Affective Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect category sentiment analysis do not necessarily occur in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Beta Distribution-guided aspect-aware graph construction based on external knowledge . they use aspect-related words as the pivots to derive aspect-relevant weights . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 6 benchmark datasets. |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
Formally Specifying the Intended Behavior of the Program: LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Program Specification Synthesis (2026.acl-demo)
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Cheng Wen, Hu Junjie, YiKun Hu, Jie Su, Bin Yu, Dugang Liu, Zhiwu Xu, Weidi Sun, Shengchao Qin, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Formal verification typically requires developers to write detailed formal specifications . a formal verification system that generates candidate specifications is costly and error-prone . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven neuro-symbolic demonstration system that reframes specification writing as constrained structured synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces hallucinations and produces proof-ready annotations. |
CB-Whisper: Contextual Biasing Whisper Using Open-Vocabulary Keyword-Spotting (2024.lrec-main)
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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. |
LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relations (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode text-to-SQL data are node-centric and ignore semantics embedded in the topological structure of edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL model to mine relational features without constructing meta-paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Vardaan Pahuja, Yadong Lu, Corby Rosset, Boyu Gou, Arindam Mitra, Spencer Whitehead, Yu Su, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
| Challenge: | Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, with 94K successful multimodal web trajectories, 720K screenshots, and 33M web elements. |
TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuheng Lu, Qian Yu, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Wei Su, Yanping Liu, Yuhang Guo, Maocheng Liang, Yunhong Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic and interconnected nature of real-world digital environments, authors show . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the transferability of GUI agents across three key dimensions . transBench includes 15 app categories with diverse functionalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic, interconnected environments. |
SPAGBias: Uncovering and Tracing Structured Spatial Gender Bias in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are being used in urban planning but there is concern that they reproduce or amplify such biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate spatial gender bias in large language models . they use a taxonomy of 62 urban micro-spaces, a prompt library and three diagnostic layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies structured gender-space associations that go beyond the public-private divide, forming nuanced micro-level mappings. |
Identifying Factual Inconsistencies in Summaries: Grounding LLM Inference via Task Taxonomy (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on specialized BERT-variants and recent LLMs to reason inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate task-specific taxonomy into inferences to facilitate both zero-shot and supervised paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms specialized non-LLM and recent LLM models in a number of domains. |
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Domain Adaptation for Subjective Induction Questions Answering on Products by Adversarial Disentangled Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer subjective questions about products are often imbalanced across product domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptive model that integrates multiple viewpoints into a good answer by integrating these heterogeneous and inconsistent viewpoints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates multiple viewpoints into a single answer span and is able to integrate them into the answer. |
Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Samuel Schmidgall, Yusheng Su, Ze Wang, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Jiang Liu, Michael Moor, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Approach: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Outcome: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.acl-long)
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Yindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Chen Li Yu, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value identification face critical challenges . seller-provided attribute values are often incomplete or inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method that uses taxonomy-aware contrastive learning . they use product profiles and candidate values to encode and retrieve attributes based on similarity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a taxonomy-aware, hard negative sampling and adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. |
Compositional Generalization for Neural Semantic Parsing via Span-level Supervised Attention (2021.naacl-main)
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Pengcheng Yin, Hao Fang, Graham Neubig, Adam Pauls, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Yu Su, Sam Thomson, Jacob Andreas
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to compositional generalization in semantic parsers focus on word-level alignments, but they focus on spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level supervised attention loss that improves compositional generalization in semantic parsers by focusing on spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three benchmarks of compositional generalization. |
Multi-hop Question Generation with Graph Convolutional Network (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on text-based QG focus on generating SQuAD-style questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop question generation model that does context encoding in multiple hops with Graph Convolutional Network and encoder fusion via an Encoder Reasoning Gate. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model generates fluent questions with high completeness and outperforms baselines on automatic evaluation metrics. |
Low-Resource Generation of Multi-hop Reasoning Questions (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate valid and fluent questions from text are limited and insufficient for training. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate multi-hop reasoning questions from the raw text in a low resource circumstance by deducing over multiple relations on several sentences in the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to the task of machine reading comprehension and achieve significant performance improvements. |
Distilling Large Embeddings via Hyperspherical Householder Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantizing large embeddings rely on Euclidean quantization, which is poorly aligned with the angular geometry induced by contrastive embeddment training. |
| Approach: | They propose a geometry-aware distillation method that compresses large embeddings into short discrete representations via iterative Householder transformations on the unit hypersphere. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces decoding cost and maintains strong semantic retrieval accuracy. |
LenAtten: An Effective Length Controlling Unit For Text Summarization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fixed length summarization (FLS) requires generating summaries with a preset number of characters or words. |
| Approach: | They propose a length control unit called LenAtten to break this trade-off by generating a short and coherent summary with the target length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves controllability and ROGUE scores and generalizes well. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas . a new architecture, ShadowGNN, processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels . |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models on a text-to-sql benchmark . it uses domain-independent representations to extract logical linking between question and schema . |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
Integrating Semantics and Neighborhood Information with Graph-Driven Generative Models for Document Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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Zijing Ou, Qinliang Su, Jianxing Yu, Bang Liu, Jingwen Wang, Ruihui Zhao, Changyou Chen, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document hashing combine only one of semantics and neighborhood information, lacking a theoretical principle to guide the integration process. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode neighborhood information with a graph-induced Gaussian distribution and integrate it with generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained as efficiently as state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
KGPT: Knowledge-Grounded Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation rely on labeled data, which is costly to acquire and limits their application to new tasks and domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage pre-training and transfer learning to address this problem by leveraging a general knowledge-grounded generation model and a knowledge-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate knowledge-enriched text on a knowledge-grounded text corpus crawled from the web in three settings. |
Retaining Key Information under High Compression Ratios: Query-Guided Compressor for LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress long contexts have degraded dramatically as compression ratios increase, sometimes even falling to the closed-book level. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-guided compression method that preserves key information within the compressed context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can consistently perform well even at high compression ratios, and offers significant benefits in terms of inference cost and throughput. |
Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Xiang, Tianyi Tang, Yang Su, Bowen Yu, An Yang, Fei Huang, Yichang Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on character-centric approach and fail to reflect real-world applications. |
| Approach: | RMTBench is a user-centric bilingual role-playing benchmark featuring 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
| Outcome: | RMTBench features 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
What It Takes to Achieve 100% Condition Accuracy on WikiSQL (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | despite of its simplicity, none of the publicly reported structured query generation models can achieve an accuracy beyond 62%, which is far from enough for practical use. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can achieve 88.6% condition accuracy on WikiSQL . they ask: why is the accuracy still low for such simple queries? |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can reach up to 88.6% condition accuracy on the WikiSQL dataset. |
SPM: A Split-Parsing Method for Joint Multi-Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on utterances with a single intent, but lack the ability to assign slots to each corresponding intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a split-parsing method for joint intent detection and slot filling . they split an input sentence into multiple sub-sentences which contain a single-intent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three multi-intent datasets on multi-tasks. |
Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Cen Zhao, Tiantian Zhang, Hanchen Su, Yufeng Zhang, Shaowei Su, Mingzhi Xu, Yu Liu, Wei Han, Jeremy Werner, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad
| Challenge: | Existing offline approaches to improve an LLM-based customer support system rely on batch annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-in-the-loop framework that integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retraining cycles from months to weeks by integrating four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations. |
PlotGen-Bench: Evaluating VLMs on Generating Visualization Code from Diverse Plots across Multiple Libraries (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | PlotGen-Bench evaluates vision-language models' ability to generate executable visualization code from plots under realistic and complex visualization requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate plot-to-code generation in vision-language models . they use Matplot, Matplos, Mat3D, Mat4D, and Mat4E to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 9 major categories, 30 subcategories, and 3 core tasks . it covers 2D, 3D and animated plots across 5 widely used visualization libraries. |
Line Graph Enhanced AMR-to-Text Generation with Mix-Order Graph Attention Networks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-to-sequence approaches use graph neural networks as encoders, but they lack the structure information needed to translate AMR into the graph-based data. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence task which aims to recover natural language from Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) they adopt graph attention networks with higher-order neighborhood information to explore the edge relations in AMR graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on English AMR benchmark datasets and is able to translate the AMR semantics into the natural language. |
Data Augmentation with Atomic Templates for Spoken Language Understanding (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enlarge SLU data require large amounts of labelled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method with atomic templates for Spoken Language Understanding which generates atomic exemplars from atomic template. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a DSTC 2&3 dataset which is a domain adaptation setting of SLU. |
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources (2023.findings-acl)
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Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Winata, Bryan Wilie, Fajri Koto, Rahmad Mahendra, Christian Wibisono, Ade Romadhony, Karissa Vincentio, Jennifer Santoso, David Moeljadi, Cahya Wirawan, Frederikus Hudi, Muhammad Satrio Wicaksono, Ivan Parmonangan, Ika Alfina, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Samsul Rahmadani, Yulianti Oenang, Ali Septiandri, James Jaya, Kaustubh Dhole, Arie Suryani, Rifki Afina Putri, Dan Su, Keith Stevens, Made Nindyatama Nityasya, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Tiezheng Yu, Vito Ghifari, Wenliang Dai, Yan Xu, Dyah Damapuspita, Haryo Wibowo, Cuk Tho, Ichwanul Karo Karo, Tirana Fatyanosa, Ziwei Ji, Graham Neubig, Timothy Baldwin, Sebastian Ruder, Pascale Fung, Herry Sujaini, Sakriani Sakti, Ayu Purwarianti
| Challenge: | Existing NLP research in Indonesian languages has been held back by factors such as language diversity, orthographic variation, resource limitation and other societal challenges. |
| Approach: | They present a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages and open access to previously non-public resources. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the datasets are highly reliable and can be used to generate the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. |
Training LLMs to be Better Text Embedders through Bidirectional Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chang Su, Dengliang Shi, Siyuan Huang, Jintao Du, Changhua Meng, Yu Cheng, Weiqiang Wang, Zhouhan Lin
| Challenge: | Existing text embedding approaches often leverage the embeddment of the final token, typically a reserved special token such as ‘[EOS]‘. |
| Approach: | They propose to add a new training stage before contrastive learning to enrich the semantics of the final token embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training stage improves performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), achieving new state-of-the-art results across different LLM base models and scales. |
When is Tree Search Useful for LLM Planning? It Depends on the Discriminator (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build language agents that can plan efficiently and accurately have not met the needs of advanced planning methods to achieve such improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative correction and tree search to solve multi-step problems in a language agent framework with three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a planning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on two tasks, text-to-SQL parsing and mathematical reasoning, while using discriminators with 90% accuracy. |
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)
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| 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. |
Continual Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation via Dual Importance-based Model Division (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
OpenFact: Factuality Enhanced Open Knowledge Extraction (2023.tacl-1)
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Linfeng Song, Ante Wang, Xiaoman Pan, Hongming Zhang, Dian Yu, Lifeng Jin, Haitao Mi, Jinsong Su, Yue Zhang, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing OIE systems organize knowledge into subject-relation-object (SRO) triplets, and they use templates to extract such knowledge triplet. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to handle expressiveness and groundedness in OpenFact . they propose to use templates, extra constraints, and adopt human efforts to ensure that most triplets contain enough details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves expressiveness and groundedness of OpenFact . it is more accurate and denser than OPIEC-Linked, which is grounded to Wikidata . |
CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Narrative Question Answering with Cutting-Edge Open-Domain QA Techniques: A Comprehensive Study (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in open-domain question answering (ODQA) have led to human-level performance on many datasets. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive and quantitative analysis about the difficulty of book QA . they compare the results of their research with extensive ODQA experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on event-oriented questions on the NarrativeQA dataset. |
EvoR: Evolving Retrieval for Code Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) use static knowledge bases with a single source, limiting adaptation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOR achieves two to four times of execution accuracy compared to other methods such as Reflexion. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented code generation pipeline that employs the synchronous evolution of queries and diverse knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves two to four times of execution accuracy compared to other methods. |
Memory-enhanced Large Language Model for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing via Deep Hierarchical Syntax Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
Efficient Context and Schema Fusion Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
DialSQL: Dialogue Based Structured Query Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning and semantic parsing have improved the translation accuracy of natural language questions to structured queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based structured query generation framework that leverages human intelligence to boost performance of existing algorithms via user interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a WikiSQL dataset from 61.3% to 69.0% using only 2.4 validation questions per dialogue. |
Improving LLM Generations via Fine-Grained Self-Endorsement (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but can still fail frequently on knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-endorsement framework that leverages fine-grained fact-level comparisons across multiple sampled responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve factuality of generations with simple prompts across scales of LLMs. |
OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialogue systems lack ontology-aware pretraining methods for task-orientated dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD) . they propose to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data to bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an exciting boost and obtains competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks. |
Intent-Driven Semantic ID Generation for Grounded Conversational News Recommendation (2026.acl-industry)
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| 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. |
Federated Learning for Semantic Parsing: Task Formulation, Evaluation Setup, New Algorithms (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural semantic parsers have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but they are data-hungry and require annotators to have intimate knowledge of formal programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where multiple clients collaboratively train one global model without sharing their semantic parsing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on three widely adopted FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedOPT and FedProx) and clients with smaller datasets enjoy faster performance. |
AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization via Multi-LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak research exhibits limitations in universality, validity, and efficiency . Existing methods for jailbreaking LLMs have limited validity and effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box approach that uses wordplay-guided mapping rule sampling to create universal adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method efficiently identifies security vulnerabilities across various LLMs, achieving an average success rate of over 80% with fewer than 10 queries. |
MICE for CATs: Model-Internal Confidence Estimation for Calibrating Agents with Tools (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that measure confidence in tool-using agents are poorly calibrated. |
| Approach: | They propose a class of model-internal confidence estimators to assess confidence when calling tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed class beats baselines on a simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models. |
Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that mess up or drop the core structural information of input graphs are lacking in graph-to-text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage richer training signals to guide a graph-to-text generation model by focusing on autoencoding losses and back-propagating the losses to better calibrate the model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two benchmarks show the proposed model over a state-of-the-art model . two types of autoencoding losses are used to back-propagate the model based on multitask training . |
How Large a Vocabulary Does Text Classification Need? A Variational Approach to Vocabulary Selection (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a pre-defined vocabulary is a common approach to selecting text inputs . however, using a large vocabulary is not economical, as it limits the model's applicability on computation-or memoryconstrained scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a more sophisticated variational vocabulary dropout to perform vocabulary selection . they propose two new metrics to measure area under accuracy-vocab curve and Vocab Size under X% accuracy drop . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baselines on the vocabulary selection problem on multiple NLP classification tasks. |
Generating Deep Questions with Commonsense Reasoning Ability from the Text by Disentangled Adversarial Inference (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense question generation produce shallow questions that can be answered by simple word matching. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of commonsense question generation that aims to yield deep-level questions from the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can yield deep-level and to-the-point questions from the text. |
Completing A Systematic Review in Hours instead of Months with Interactive AI Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Systematic reviews (SRs) are vital for evidence-based practice in high stakes disciplines, such as healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-centered interactive AI agent powered by large language models that partitions a large literature corpus based on semantics and employs . |
| Outcome: | InsightAgent improves quality of synthesized SRs by 27.2%, reaching 79.7% of human-written quality. |
Neural Graph Matching Networks for Chinese Short Text Matching (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation can be erroneous, ambiguous or inconsistent, causing performance problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence matching framework that uses paired word lattices as input instead of a character sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art short text matching models on two Chinese datasets. |
Generative Pre-trained Speech Language Model with Efficient Hierarchical Transformer (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer that quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a transformer architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing speech language models in word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng, Yuansheng Ni, Yubo Wang, Kai Zhang, Shengbang Tong, Yuxuan Sun, Botao Yu, Ge Zhang, Huan Sun, Yu Su, Wenhu Chen, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models have led to progress in tackling complex reasoning tasks that combine textual and visual information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs lower on MMMU-Pro than on the previous benchmark, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9%. |
Don’t Get Lost in the Trees: Streamlining LLM Reasoning by Overcoming Tree Search Exploration Pitfalls (2025.acl-long)
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Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Ye Tian, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Xiangyu Duan, Zhaopeng Tu, Jinsong Su, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in tree search algorithms guided by verifiers have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of increased computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an e ffici ent tree sear ch framework that is a plug-and-play system compatible with various tree search algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computational costs and prioritizes resource allocation to harder tasks (Levels 3-4) over simpler ones (Level 1-2), addressing both over-exploration in basic problems and under-exploation in complex cases. |
Can Foundation Models Watch, Talk and Guide You Step by Step to Make a Cake? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuwei Bao, Keunwoo Yu, Yichi Zhang, Shane Storks, Itamar Bar-Yossef, Alex de la Iglesia, Megan Su, Xiao Zheng, Joyce Chai
| Challenge: | despite advances in AI, it remains a challenge to develop interactive task guidance systems that can offer situated, personalized guidance and assist humans in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal benchmark dataset to study whether interactive task guidance systems can be quickly adapted to perceptually enabled tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models demonstrate fair performances in some cases with no training . the results will provide a stepping stone for future work on situated task guidance . |
OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
Dual Context-Guided Continuous Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based paradigms have shown their competitive performance in many NLP tasks, but their effectiveness varies upon the model and training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual context-guided continuous prompt tuning method that integrates contextual information into the input input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing prompt tuning methods in the few-shot setting and can be used in many NLP tasks. |
Global Textual Relation Embedding for Relational Understanding (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn textual relation embeddings are lacking in large open-domain corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a general-purpose embedding of textual relations using a large dataset from Freebase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed embedding can facilitate downstream tasks requiring relational understanding of the text. |
AIR: Complex Instruction Generation via Automatic Iterative Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex instructions are resource-intensive and lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate complex instructions with constraints using a document-generated initial instruction and an iterative refinement framework to incorporate LLM-as-judge guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for generating complex instructions, and outperformed existing methods. |
Refining BERT Embeddings for Document Hashing via Mutual Information Maximization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised document hashing methods are mostly established on generative models . due to the difficulties of capturing long dependency structures, these methods rarely model the raw documents directly . |
| Approach: | They propose to learn hash codes from BERT embeddings by modifying existing models . they use mutual information maximization principle to maximize mutual information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods learned from BERT embeddings on three benchmark datasets. |
Complementary Evidence Identification in Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| 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. |
Don’t Generate, Discriminate: A Proposal for Grounding Language Models to Real-World Environments (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models lack grounding to real-world environments . a missing piece is the connection between LMs and the environment . |
| Approach: | They propose a generic framework for grounded language understanding that capitalizes on discriminative ability of LMs instead of their generative ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework capitalizes on discriminative ability of LMs instead of their generative ability. |
Embedding Dynamic Attributed Networks by Modeling the Evolution Processes (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to embed nodes into low-dimensional vectors focus on static networks, but in practice, many networks are evolving over time and hence are dynamic, e.g., social networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract high-order neighborhood information at each given timestamp and then use an embedding prediction framework to capture the temporal correlations. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods for dynamic link prediction and node classification tasks. |
An Imitation Game for Learning Semantic Parsers from User Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning semantic parsers are expensive and tedious . despite the widespread applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning is tedious a task . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative method for learning semantic parsers directly from users . they propose an annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm that iteratively collects new datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective and shows promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem. |
Living in the Moment: Can Large Language Models Grasp Co-Temporal Reasoning? (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Improve Query Focused Abstractive Summarization by Incorporating Answer Relevance (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Query focused summarization models aim to generate summaries from source documents that can answer the given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a QFS-BART model that incorporates the explicit answer relevance of the source documents given the query via a question answering model. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. |
One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
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Hongjin Su, Weijia Shi, Jungo Kasai, Yizhong Wang, Yushi Hu, Mari Ostendorf, Wen-tau Yih, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | a new method for embedding text is developed for tasks that require specialized encoders . INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddables tailored to different tasks and domains based on instruction finetuning . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions . they first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 70 embedding evaluation tasks with fewer parameters than the previous best model. |
ArcaneQA: Dynamic Program Induction and Contextualized Encoding for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing ranking-based KBQA models struggle with flexibility in predicting complicated queries and have impractical running time. |
| Approach: | They propose a new generation-based question answering on knowledge bases model that addresses both large search space and ambiguities in schema linking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes two intertwined challenges on popular KBQA datasets and is highly competitive and efficient. |
AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Wentao Shi, Yu Wang, Yuyang Zhao, Yuxin Chen, Fuli Feng, Xueyuan Hao, Xi Su, Qi GU, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, Xiangnan He
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification. |
Multi-Value-Product Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Huike Zou, Haiyang Yang, Yindu Su, Chen Li Yu, Qinye Xie, Chengbao Lian, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value identification suffer from cascading errors and lack of generalization capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level retrieval scheme that uses products and attribute values as distinct hierarchical levels in PAVI domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods on a real-world industrial dataset. |
Document Classification for COVID-19 Literature (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a global pandemic has made it more important than ever to quickly and accurately retrieve relevant scientific literature for effective consumption by researchers in a wide variety of fields. |
| Approach: | They analyze a LitCovid dataset to find out how classification models can help organize COVID-19 research papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all baseline models on the LitCovid dataset . it also outperformed BioBERT and other models with micro-F1 and accuracy scores of 86% and 75% . |
PRMBench: A Fine-grained and Challenging Benchmark for Process-Level Reward Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in complex reasoning tasks such as mathematics and code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level benchmark specifically designed to assess the fine-grained error detection capabilities of PRMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model measures the accuracy, soundness, and sensitivity of 25 models across open-source and closed-source large language models. |
Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code (2023.acl-short)
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Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Michael White, Raymond Mooney, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Yu Su, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers are not accurate enough for use in text-to-SQL parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to build clause-level edit models to correct SQL queries instead of token-level ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines. |
Targeting the Needle, Ignoring the Haystack: Anchoring Crucial Cues for Evolving Scam Call Detection via an LLM-Assisted Classifier (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fraud detection on online service platforms often fail to generalize due to the scarcity of labeled data and the continuous evolution of conversational contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that anchors detection on Semantic Primitives . they prioritize stable evidence over conversational noise to ensure a verifiable fraud tactic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior robustness and efficiency compared to baselines . it prioritizes stable evidence over diverse conversational noise . |
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
WebOlympus: An Open Platform for Web Agents on Live Websites (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Web agents are emerging as powerful tools for automating tasks in cyberspace . however, there is a lack of standardized and user-friendly tools for research and development . |
| Approach: | They propose an open platform for web agents operating on live websites with a Chrome extension and a safety monitor module to ensure their trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | WebOlympus is an open platform for web agents operating on live websites. |
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a multi-lingual approach to training dialog systems is expensive and tedious, but it can be useful for cross-lingual support. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate data for multiple languages and train a multi-lingual dialog system for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the expensive human annotation and achieves promising results. |
Bridging the Generalization Gap in Text-to-SQL Parsing with Schema Expansion (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers struggle with out-of-domain generalization problems, arguing that they lack the ability to match domain specific phrases to composite operations over columns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a synthetic dataset and a re-purposed train/test split to quantify out-of-domain generalization over column operations to address this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline parsers on the domain generalization problem, while boosting the underlying parser’ overall performance by 13.8% relative accuracy gain (5.1% absolute). |
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
Optimal Partial Transport Based Sentence Selection for Long-form Document Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document matching are limited by the partial nature of the sentence-level matching signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching approach that equips existing document matching models with an Optimal Partial Transport component, namely OPT-Match, which selects the key sentences that play a major role in matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on four publicly available datasets and the key sentences selected by it are consistent with human-provided rationales. |
UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
A Systematic Investigation of KB-Text Embedding Alignment at Scale (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge bases (KBs) and text often contain complementary knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for aligning KB and text embeddings for joint reasoning . they also evaluate alignment methods to infuse textual information into KB embeddables . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to predict link prediction on emerging entities and events using textual information. |
Automatic Evaluation of Attribution by Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) incorporate external references to generate and support claims. however, evaluating the attribution remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They investigate automatic evaluation of attribution given by large language models . they define different types of attributed errors and then explore two approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods highlight promising signals and challenges. |
When More Data Hurts: A Troubling Quirk in Developing Broad-Coverage Natural Language Understanding Systems (2022.emnlp-main)
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Elias Stengel-Eskin, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Sam Thomson, Hao Fang, Benjamin Van Durme, Jason Eisner, Yu Su
| Challenge: | In natural language understanding systems, users’ evolving needs necessitate the addition of new features over time, indexed by new symbols added to the meaning representation space. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a small set of new symbols to build broad-coverage NLU systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two prototypical NLU tasks: intent recognition and semantic parsing. |
LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and outperforms GPT-4. |
Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are generalist agents capable of operating within complex environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a class of tools that can serve as a middleware layer shielding LLMs from environmental complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can shield the LLM from environmental complexity in two representative complex environments. |
GRASS: Gradient-based Adaptive Layer-wise Importance Sampling for Memory-efficient Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Language Agents: Foundations, Prospects, and Risks (2024.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Language agents are autonomous agents that can follow language instructions to perform diverse tasks in real-world or simulated environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a conceptual framework for language agents and a comprehensive discussion on key topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tutorial provides a conceptual framework of language agents and comprehensive discussion on important topic areas. |
Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
SURf: Teaching Large Vision-Language Models to Selectively Utilize Retrieved Information (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the text modality or are limited to specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to teach Large Vision-Language Models to selectively utilize retrieved information and improve their robustness against irrelevant or misleading references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LVLMs’ ability to utilize retrieved multimodal references and their robustness against irrelevant or misleading information. |
Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| 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 . |
Global Relation Embedding for Relation Extraction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract textual relations with distant supervision are limited by their reliance on supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed relations with global statistics of relations to combat the wrong labeling problem of distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust to training noise introduced by distant supervision and improves relation extraction models. |
Born Pragmatic, Trained to Hallucinate? Quantifying the Origins of Contextual Bias in LLMs via the PaCE Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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 . |
Efficient Document Retrieval by End-to-End Refining and Quantizing BERT Embedding with Contrastive Product Quantization (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic hashing methods only learn a binary code for each document and use Hamming distance to evaluate document distances. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage BERT embeddings to perform efficient retrieval based on product quantization technique . they transform original BERT embedded codewords and feed it into a probabilistic product quantizer module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks. |
Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neural natural language generation focus on surface-level realizations with limited emphasis on logical inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a model is tasked with generating natural language statements that can be logically entailed by facts in an open-domain semi-structured table. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on the existing TabFact dataset with a wide range of logical/symbolic inferences. |
Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing technologies are not well-suited for use in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based intelligent agent that generates a clarification question in natural language . they propose 'interactive semantic parsing' with a human user in the loop . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both parsing accuracy and user confidence . it is demonstrated on two text-to-SQL datasets with different state-of-the-art parsers . |
Aligning Instruction Tasks Unlocks Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Relation Extractors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models on large instruction-following datasets improves their performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, but they fail to outperform small LMs on relation extraction (RE), a fundamental information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns RE with question answering (QA), a predominant task in instruction-tuning datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms small LLMs on relation extraction (RE), a fundamental information extraction task, by a large margin. |
MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Leveraging BERT and TFIDF Features for Short Text Clustering via Alignment-Promoting Co-Training (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
SafeScientist: Enhancing AI Scientist Safety for Risk-Aware Scientific Discovery (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kunlun Zhu, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Nuoxing Shang, Zijia Liu, Peixuan Han, Yue Su, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet raised critical ethical and safety concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves safety performance by 35% compared to traditional frameworks. |
Solving the Right Problem is Key for Translational NLP: A Case Study in UMLS Vocabulary Insertion (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a gap exists between research output and real-world task for automated NLP systems . a recent study shows that powerful models alone will not yield translational NLP solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a formulation for UMLS vocabulary insertion which mirrors the real-world task . they propose measurable qualitative improvements to editors who carry out the UVI task based on strong datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and improves the UVI task. |
Upcycling Instruction Tuning from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts via Parameter Merging (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for tuning large language models from dense to MoE face significant data requirements and require large-scale post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an upcycling instruction tuning approach for tuning a dense pre-trained model into a MoE instruction model using genetic algorithm and parameter merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models with a small amount of seed data and improves their scaling. |
Error Detection for Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers are often over-confident, thus casting doubt on their trustworthiness when deployed for real use. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent error detection model for text-to-SQL semantic parsing . they use a language model of code as its bedrock and graph neural networks to learn structural features of queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms parser-dependent uncertainty metrics on three strong parsers . it could improve the performance and usability of text-to-SQL semantic parsing, it is shown . |
Privacy-Preserving Domain Adaptation of Semantic Parsers (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogue systems often assist users with personal or confidential matters . a lack of privacy controls prevents developers from observing actual usage . authors propose a method to generate realistic user utterances synthetically without compromising privacy . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates latent semantic parses and generates utterances based on the parses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves MAUVE by 2.5X and parse tree function-type overlap by 1.3X . it also shows gains of 8.5% points on its accuracy with the new feature . |