Papers by Yuan Chang

50 papers
Multimodal Conversation Structure Understanding (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: a new set of tasks is being developed to parse the structure of conversation . female characters are 1.2 times more likely to be cast as an addressee or side-participant .
Approach: They propose a set of tasks and release an annotated dataset for multimodal conversation structure understanding.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline model, but performance drops when character identities are anonymized.
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing data selection techniques are designed for small data pools, a study finds . filtering data by token length is an efficient method for improving results .
Approach: They use self-scoring methods that do not rely on external help to perform fine-tuning . they also find that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method .
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform random selection on large datasets on large data pools.
PropGenie: A Multi-Agent Conversational Framework for Real Estate Assistance (2026.eacl-demo)

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Challenge: PropGenie is a multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs) it provides comprehensive real estate assistance in real-world scenarios .
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework based on large language models to deliver comprehensive real estate assistance in real-world scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms a general-purpose LLM and a domain-specific chatbot in real-world scenarios.
Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent training-based TTS methods, such as continued reinforcement learning, have surged in popularity, while training-free TTS approaches are gradually fading from prominence.
Approach: They propose a fine-grained sequential scaling method guided by process verification that integrates training-free TTS methods with other classical parallel scaling methods at the step level.
Outcome: Experiments on five instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) show that training-free TTS methods can extend reasoning performance boundaries.
Detoxifying Large Language Models via the Diversity of Toxic Samples (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for analyzing and utilizing toxic samples are limited . current methods fail to fully harness their potential .
Approach: They propose a diverse detoxification framework that leverages toxic samples' diversity . they propose MPSG strategy and SC-DPO approach to elicit personalized toxic responses .
Outcome: The proposed framework could be used to optimize large language models for user safety . it incorporates two components: MPSG strategy and SC-DPO approach .
AGGC: Adaptive Group Gradient Clipping for Stabilizing Large Language Model Training (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Adaptive group-wise gradient clipping (AGGC) is a new approach to stabilize training of Large Language Models.
Approach: They propose a method to stabilize gradient clipping by partitioning parameters into groups based on functional types and a time-dependent scheduling mechanism to balance exploration and convergence.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms standard LoRA and achieves 72.93% accuracy . it can be integrated into existing pipelines with negligible overhead.
Breaking Down Power Barriers in On-Device Streaming ASR: Insights and Solutions (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Streaming automatic speech recognition models use high power consumption to improve usability and accuracy.
Approach: They propose to optimize on-device speech recognition models by adjusting component energy sensitivities based on their specific energy sensitities to reduce power consumption.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves up to 47% lower energy usage while preserving comparable model accuracy and improving real-time performance compared to leading methods.
One QuantLLM for ALL: Fine-tuning Quantized LLMs Once for Efficient Deployments (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Quantization has shown promise for Large Language Models, but current methods require lengthy training to alleviate quantization loss.
Approach: They propose to decouple weights and incorporate Low-Rank adapters to reduce weight sharing . they validate the approach on LLaMA2 families and Mistral on downstream evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed approach shows high performance while reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios.
Retrieval Enhanced Data Augmentation for Question Answering on Privacy Policies (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing labeled datasets are heavily imbalanced, limiting the QA performance in this domain.
Approach: They propose a question answering task that captures relevant text segments from unlabeled policy documents and expands the positive examples in the training set.
Outcome: The proposed framework elevates the baseline by a large margin (10% F1) and achieves a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 50%.
Conditional Supervised Contrastive Learning for Fair Text Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in natural language processing have demonstrated societal bias in existing NLP models.
Approach: They propose to use contrastive learning to learn fair representations for text classification . they conduct experiments on two text datasets to demonstrate their methods are stable .
Outcome: The proposed methods balancing task performance and bias mitigation are stable in different hyperparameter settings.
ExplainaBoard: An Explainable Leaderboard for NLP (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Using leaderboards, researchers can track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation using a leaderboard.
Outcome: The ExplainaBoard is an evaluation tool for natural language processing (NLP) it covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks.
QBridge: Bridging Natural Language and SQL via Gold Query Rewriting with Agentic Refinement (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) is an intuitive interface for querying structured data . but real user questions are noisy, ambiguous, and weakly grounded to database semantics.
Approach: They propose an agentic feedback-driven NL2SQL framework that bridges natural language and SQL via Gold Query.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms strong prompting and agentic baselines on spider, BIRD, and three robustness variants on NL2SQL.
FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent research shows keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks.
Approach: They propose an efficient weakly-supervised text classification approach using unlabeled data . they use dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from unlabed corpus .
Outcome: The proposed weakly-supervised classification method outperforms keyword-driven models on a wide range of classification tasks.
Cognitive-Level Adaptive Generation via Capability-Aware Retrieval and Style Adaptation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models struggle to adapt content to users with differing cognitive capacities, leading to cognitive misalignment.
Approach: They propose a cognitive-level alignment framework that aligns both knowledge complexity and presentation style with user cognition.
Outcome: The proposed framework aligns knowledge complexity and presentation style with user cognition.
TreeReview: A Dynamic Tree of Questions Framework for Deep and Efficient LLM-based Scientific Peer Review (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in assisting peer review, but current methods struggle to generate thorough and insightful reviews while maintaining efficiency.
Approach: They propose a framework that models paper review as a hierarchical and bidirectional question-answering process.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on full review generation and actionable feedback comments generation tasks while reducing LLM token usage by up to 80% compared to computationally intensive approaches.
CT-FineBench: A Diagnostic Fidelity Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of CT Report Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for radiology report generation focus on lexical overlap and entity matching.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the fine-grained factual consistency of CT reports . they use a question-answering process to query a machine-generated report .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates the fine-grained factual consistency of CT reports . it correlates better with expert clinical assessment and is more sensitive to errors .
KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Transfer in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that a small subset of parameters is highly effective in fine-tuning . prior work shows that there are a few additional parameters corresponding to an intrinsic dimension in a well-trained Large Language Model.
Approach: They propose a method to identify a small subset of LLM parameters highly effective in multilingual fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed method can find the certified winning tickets in the embedding layer, and fine-tuning on the found parameters is guaranteed to perform as well as full fine- tuning.
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity.
StructFlowBench: A Structured Flow Benchmark for Multi-turn Instruction Following (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on fine-grained constraint satisfaction and domain-specific capability assessment, yet overlook the crucial structural dependencies between dialogue turns that distinguish multi-turn from single-turn interactions.
Approach: They propose a multi-turn instruction following benchmark with structural flow modeling that defines an innovative structural flow framework with six fundamental inter-turn relationships.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on a framework with six fundamental inter-turn relationships and is able to analyze and generate specific dialogue flows tailored to specific scenarios.
Large Language Model Evaluation via Matrix Nuclear-Norm (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are computationally intensive due to their O(n3) time complexity with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).
Approach: They propose a metric to quantify the data compression proficiency of large language models and a convex approximation of matrix rank to capture both predictive discriminability and diversity.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves speeds 8 to 24 times faster than Matrix Entropy for the CEREBRAS-GPT model as models increase from 111M to 6.7B .
LACMA: Language-Aligning Contrastive Learning with Meta-Actions for Embodied Instruction Following (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Embodied Instruction Following has shown an impressive success rate when the environment has been seen in training, but when deployed in an unseen environment, it tends to struggle when deployed with an unsightly environment.
Approach: They propose to explicitly align the agent’s hidden states with the instructions via contrastive learning to bridge the semantic gap between high-level language instructions and the agent's low-level action space.
Outcome: The proposed meta-actions achieve a 4.5% success rate in unseen environments compared to a strong multi-modal Transformer baseline .
On the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks against Neural Text Classifier (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples . a small perturbation to an input alters the model prediction .
Approach: They propose a genetic algorithm to find models that can induce adversarial examples to fool models . they propose word replacement rules that can be used for model diagnostics from these examples .
Outcome: The proposed model can fool almost all existing models, while ignoring the data bias in the training set.
PLUE: Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark for Privacy Policies in English (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing efforts to understand privacy policies are limited by processing the language in a way exclusive to a single task focusing on certain privacy practices.
Approach: They propose a privacy policy language understanding evaluation benchmark to evaluate the understanding of privacy policies across multiple tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the understanding of privacy policies across multiple tasks.
Speculative Contrastive Decoding (2024.acl-short)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance in language tasks, yet their auto-regressive inference is limited due to high computational requirements and is sub-optimal due to the exposure bias.
Approach: They propose a decoding approach that leverages predictions from smaller language models to achieve both decoding acceleration and quality improvement.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves both decoding acceleration and quality improvement on four diverse language tasks.
BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a practical paradigm for aligning Large Language Models.
Approach: They propose a framework that stabilizes advantage estimation by combining prompt-local on-policy statistics with semantic-cluster-conditioned historical moments.
Outcome: Experiments show that RLVR improves training stability and performance compared to critic-based methods . compared with other approaches, RL VR improves in cold-start regimes with binary verifiers .
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints.
Approach: They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration.
MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: In math reasoning with large language models, fine-tuning data augmentation by query evolution and diverse reasoning paths is empirically verified effective.
Approach: They propose to fine-tune data augmentation by query evolution and diverse reasoning paths.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on GSM8K and MATH.
Intent Classification and Slot Filling for Privacy Policies (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Sentences written in privacy policies explain privacy practices and the constituent text spans convey further specific information.
Approach: They propose an English corpus of 5,250 intent and 11,788 slot annotations . they propose two alternative neural approaches to model the corpus as a sequence-to-sequence learning task.
Outcome: The proposed corpus predicts intent classification and slot filling, while the sequence tagging method outperforms slot filler by a large margin.
How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a technique used to enhance multiple abilities in large language models.
Approach: They propose to study the interplay of data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during supervised fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed model improves math reasoning and code generation with increasing data amount . the proposed model size and SFT strategies can be used to learn multiple skills with different scaling patterns.
LoRA-MGPO: Mitigating Double Descent in Low-Rank Adaptation via Momentum-Guided Perturbation Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapts large language models by training only a small fraction of parameters, but as the rank of the low-rank matrices increases, LoRA exhibits an unstable “double descent” phenomenon, which delays convergence and impairs generalization by causing instability due to the attraction to sharp local minima.
Approach: They propose a framework that incorporates Momentum-Guided Perturbation Optimization (MGPO) MGPO stabilizes training dynamics by mitigating double descent phenomenon and guiding weight perturbations using momentum vectors from the optimizer’s state.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on natural language understanding benchmarks and shows that it improves convergence and generalization.
PolicyQA: A Reading Comprehension Dataset for Privacy Policies (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Privacy policy documents are long and verbose. Hence, a question answering system can help users find the information that is relevant and important to them.
Approach: They propose to provide users with a short text span from policy documents to search for answers from a long text segment.
Outcome: The proposed question answering system can help users find information relevant to them.
A Survey of Retentive Network (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the effectiveness of the Retentive Networks have not yet been conducted.
Approach: They propose a retention mechanism that integrates the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models.
Outcome: The proposed retention mechanism combines the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models.
Predicting Rewards Alongside Tokens: Non-disruptive Parameter Insertion for Efficient Inference Intervention in Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to fine tune LLMs produce unsafe responses and unreliable reasoning, but this solution introduces substantial time and space overhead due to the separate models required.
Approach: They propose to insert extra parameters into transformer architecture to predict calibration signals along with original LLM output.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces time and space costs while enabling seamless online deployment.
ToHRE: A Top-Down Classification Strategy with Hierarchical Bag Representation for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to find relational facts from texts lack hierarchical information of relations.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical classification framework which extracts relation in a top-down manner.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NYT dataset . the proposed method generates large amounts of training data by aligning KBs with unlabeled corpora .
Language Models can Evaluate Themselves via Probability Discrepancy (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks focus on superficial text differences and fail to align with human judgment.
Approach: They propose a new method to evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by calculating probability discrepancies between original response generation and revised versions of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method eliminates the need for training an additional evaluation model or relying on external proprietary models such as GPT-4 as a judger.
Routing to the Expert: Efficient Reward-guided Ensemble of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing ensemble methods for Large Language Models focus on reward model ranking of outputs, leading to significant computation overhead.
Approach: They propose a reward-guided routing method distilling rewards on training queries to train a routing function.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the best single model and ranks first on 44% of tasks.
SOS-LoRA: Static Orthogonal-Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation with Fixed Multi-Scale Scaling (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models.
Approach: They propose a drop-in extension that reparameterizes a rank-rtot update as a sum of K *static* low-rank experts.
Outcome: Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show consistent gains over matched-budget LoRA.
Don’t Take the Premise for Granted: Evaluating the Premise Critique Ability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies assess LLMs’ reasoning ability in ideal settings, ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises.
Approach: They propose to evaluate LLMs' ability to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises.
Outcome: The proposed model enables LLMs to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises.
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent VSE models combine simple pooling methods with hard triplet loss to improve performance.
Approach: They propose an adaptive pooling strategy that allows the model to learn how to aggregate features through a combination of simple pooling methods.
Outcome: The proposed strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on image-to-text and text-toimage retrieval.
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks.
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling.
A Novel Cascade Binary Tagging Framework for Relational Triple Extraction (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extract relational triples from unstructured text are inadequate to solve the overlapping triple problem.
Approach: They propose a cascade binary tagging framework that models relations as functions that map subjects to objects in a sentence.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets . it outperformed baseline methods by 17.5 and 30.2 absolute gains .
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both NLP and CV . they are comparable to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, but are more interpretable in their predictions.
Approach: They develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity . they inject the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.
All Languages Matter: On the Multilingual Safety of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English.
Approach: They propose a prompting method to improve multilingual safety of ChatGPT by enhancing cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment.
Outcome: The proposed method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses by 42% for non-English queries.
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations.
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology.
Approach: They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow.
Changing the Mind of Transformers for Topically-Controllable Language Generation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing interactive writing assistants do not allow authors to guide text generation in desired topical directions.
Approach: They propose a framework that displays multiple candidate upcoming topics and generates a text generation model that adheres to the chosen topics.
Outcome: The proposed model generates fluent sentences related to the selected topics, as judged by automated metrics and crowdsourced workers.
R-LoRA: Randomized Multi-Head LoRA for Efficient Multi-task Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves performance in multi-task learning by diversifying the head matrices through Multi-Head Dropout and Multi-head Random Initialization.
Approach: They propose a low-rank adaptive approach to fine-tune large language models by approximating weight updates through low-ranked matrices.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves performance in multi-task learning while reducing memory usage and training time.
NLoRA: Nyström-Initiated Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning is essential for adapting large language models (LLMs). However, LoRA suffers from slow convergence and some recent LoRA variants, such as PiSSA, rely on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization.
Approach: They propose to introduce a small intermediate matrix between the low-rank matrices (A) and (B) and propose NyströmLoRA (NLoRA) which leverages Nyström-based initialization for SLoRA to improve its effectiveness and efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on 5 natural language generation tasks and 8 natural language understanding tasks with minimal parameter overhead.
Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning (2022.aacl-main)

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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 .

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