Papers by Yuan Zhao
DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) decoding in large language models is latency-bounded by strictly sequential token generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based drafter that proposes multi-token candidates and then verifies them in parallel by the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed drafter generates multi-token proposals in a single forward pass while remaining compatible with standard AR verifiers. |
FISTAPruner: Layer-wise Post-training Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods require inefficient retraining for billion-scale LLMs or rely on heuristicically designed metrics to determine pruning masks, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a convex optimization model that induces sparsity in large language models by leveraging FISTA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can remove 50% of model parameters while retaining 98.6% and 95.6% of the zero-shot performance. |
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 . |
From Alignment to Entailment: A Unified Textual Entailment Framework for Entity Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode the triples of entities as embeddings and learn to align the embeddables, which prevents the direct interaction between the original information of the cross-KG entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform the triples into unified textual sequences and model the EA task as a bi-directional textual entailment task between the sequences of cross-KG entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five cross-lingual datasets and allows the mutual enhancement of the heterogeneous information. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
EVA: Evolving Semantic Adversaries for Red-Teaming GUI Agents Against Environmental Injection Attacks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yijie Lu, Manman Zhao, Tianjie Ju, Zihe Yan, Xinbei Ma, Yuan Guo, Daizong Ding, Gongshen Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for red-teaming face a trade-off between requiring target-specific knowledge and incurring prohibitive computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evolves payloads exclusively on the semantic dimension via a discovery-deployment pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EVA outperforms baselines in terms of attack success rate while evolving benign seeds into successful attacks within 1.18 to 1.71 iterations. |
Layer-wise Importance Matters: Less Memory for Better Performance in Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained popularity for adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize the importance of full layers with layer-wise importance scoring by leveraging the estimated importance scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with PEFT methods that operate on a per-layer basis and achieves better performance. |
Breaking Down Power Barriers in On-Device Streaming ASR: Insights and Solutions (2025.naacl-industry)
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Yang Li, Yuan Shangguan, Yuhao Wang, Liangzhen Lai, Ernie Chang, Changsheng Zhao, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
| 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. |
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity (2026.findings-acl)
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Zheyuan Yang, Liqiang Shang, Junjie Chen, Xun Yang, Chenglong Xu, Bo Yuan, Chenyuan Jiao, Yaoru Sun, Yilun Zhao
| Challenge: | TableVista evaluates multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity . current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combined with visually integrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on visual and structural complexity. |
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process. |
SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on identifying entities' relations from the semantics of dialogues-they utilize either the attention mechanism or a refined token graph to locate informative words. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential structure prediction task to incrementally parse SocAoG for dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. |
HacRED: A Large-Scale Relation Extraction Dataset Toward Hard Cases in Practical Applications (2021.findings-acl)
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Qiao Cheng, Juntao Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Jin Zhao, Jiaqing Liang, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Relation extraction (RE) is an essential topic in natural language processing and has attracted extensive attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-oriented construction framework to build a hard case relation extraction dataset with 65,225 relational facts annotated from 9,231 documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a high 96% F1 score on data quality and is far lower than humans. |
DTCA: Decision Tree-based Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Claim Verification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods to discover evidence for explainable claim verification are nontransparent and unexplained. |
| Approach: | They propose a Decision Tree-based Co-Attention model to discover evidence for explainable claim verification using neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model boosts the F1-score by more than 3.11%, 2.41% on two public datasets. |
CogKTR: A Knowledge-Enhanced Text Representation Toolkit for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhuoran Jin, Tianyi Men, Hongbang Yuan, Yuyang Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Zhipeng Xue, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods are limited to knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced text representation toolkit for natural language understanding . it combines knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection and knowledge application . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection, and knowledge application. |
Know-MRI: A Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter for Large Language Models (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiaxiang Liu, Boxuan Xing, Chenhao Yuan, ChenxiangZhang ChenxiangZhang, Di Wu, Xiusheng Huang, Haida Yu, Chuhan Lang, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods only support tasks with specific inputs, limiting their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an extensible module that matches different input data with interpretation methods and consolidates the interpreting outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can match different input data with interpretation methods and consolidate the interpreting outputs. |
Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization (2026.acl-long)
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Linfeng Du, Ye Yuan, Zichen Zhao, Fuyuan Lyu, Emiliano Penaloza, Xiuying Chen, Zipeng Sun, Jikun Kang, Laurent Charlin, Xue Liu, Haolun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for personalizing large language models require modifying parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight approach to personalizing large language models via retrieval augmentation . relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines on nine personalization tasks. |
Extrapolating Multilingual Understanding Models as Multilingual Generators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual understanding models are not capable of generating high-quality text compared with decoder-based causal language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt a multilingual encoder to a language generator with a small number of additional parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms initialization-based methods with 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation. |
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. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
Modeling Multi-Dimensional Cognitive States in Large Language Models under Cognitive Crowding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) mainly address isolated tasks such as emotion analysis or stance detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale model that combines large-level annotations with hyperbolic space to model human cognitive states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cognitive dimensions on single dimension tasks while retaining strong hierarchical structure. |
MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform multimodal information extraction only investigated entity-based tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings by decomposing the features into image, entity, and context factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to perform on two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results confirm it. |
R³A: Reinforced Reasoning for Relevance Assessment for RAG in User-Generated Content Platforms (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to query–document relevance assessment are limited . ambiguous user intent and asymmetric relevance are challenges for RAG platforms . |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reasoning model for relevance assessment that decomposes query intent into intent inference and evidence grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on offline benchmarks and achieves significant gains in large-scale online A/B testing. |
Topology Matters: Measuring Memory Leakage in Multi-Agent LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent LLMs are rapidly moving from prototype to real-world use . network topology is a first-order security parameter in multi-aggent systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for comparing topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
A Continued Pretrained LLM Approach for Automatic Medical Note Generation (2024.naacl-short)
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Dong Yuan, Eti Rastogi, Gautam Naik, Sree Prasanna Rajagopal, Sagar Goyal, Fen Zhao, Bharath Chintagunta, Jeffrey Ward
| Challenge: | HEAL is the first continuously trained LLaMA2-based LLM for medical conversations . despite the success of LLMs in general capabilities, they often fall short in niche domains like healthcare . |
| Approach: | They propose a 13B LLaMA2-based LLM that is purpose-built for medical conversations and measured on automated scribing. |
| Outcome: | The HEAL LLM outperforms GPT-4 and PMC-LLaMA in PubMedQA with 78.4% accuracy and parity with GPT-LLAMA in generating medical notes. |
SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing educational LLMs are vulnerable to pedagogical jailbreaks where students use answer-inducing prompts to elicit solutions rather than scaffolded instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-augmented tutoring pipeline that infers prerequisite concepts from queries and identifies mastery gaps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety under two pedagogical jailbreak scenarios while maintaining near-ceiling helpfulness under the same evaluation protocol. |
Neural Attention-Aware Hierarchical Topic Model (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural topic models (NTMs) use deep neural networks to learn topic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational autoencoder model that reconstructs sentence and document word counts using bag-of-words embeddings and pre-trained semantic embedders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model lowers reconstruction errors at sentence and document levels and finds more coherent topics from real-world datasets. |
PM2F2N: Patient Multi-view Multi-modal Feature Fusion Networks for Clinical Outcome Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on time series data but ignored clinical notes . fusion of multi-modal features of patients from different views is not feasible due to the time series and clinical notes data being stored as time series. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine time series and clinical notes to fuse multi-modal features of patients from different perspectives using graph neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing models on MIMIC-III benchmark. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
TokenPenalty: Alleviating Attention Sinks and Positional Decay in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to two relevant phenomena: massive activation phenomenon and positional information decay. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level intervention strategy that dynamically suppresses irrelevant visual tokens while preserving key contextual signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenTruth significantly improves factual consistency across MLLMs on standard image understanding benchmarks. |
CogKGE: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Toolkit and Benchmark for Representing Multi-source and Heterogeneous Knowledge (2022.acl-demo)
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Zhuoran Jin, Tianyi Men, Hongbang Yuan, Zhitao He, Dianbo Sui, Chenhao Wang, Zhipeng Xue, Yubo Chen, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on entity-centric knowledge, but CogKGE supports heterogeneous knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph embedding toolkit to represent multi-source and heterogeneous knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides a unified programming framework for KGE tasks and a series of knowledge representations for downstream tasks. |
GenPilot: A Multi-Agent System for Test-Time Prompt Optimization in Image Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Wen Ye, Zhaocheng Liu, Gui Yuwei, Tingyu Yuan, Yunyue Su, Bowen Fang, Chaoyang Zhao, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-image synthesis lack systematic error analysis and refinement strategies, resulting in limited reliability and effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play multi-agent system called GenPilot that integrates error analysis, clustering-based adaptive exploration, fine-grained verification and a memory module for iterative optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves text consistency and structural coherence on images with a plug-and-play system. |
FedGUI: Benchmarking Federated GUI Agents across Heterogeneous Platforms, Devices, and Operating Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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WenHao Wang, Haoting Shi, Mengying Yuan, Yiquan Lin, Panrong Tong, Hanzhang Zhou, Guangyi Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Yue Wang, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | a lack of benchmarks capture real-world, cross-platform heterogeneity in GUI training . traditional methods to train GUI agents rely on centralized data collection and manual labeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for developing and evaluating federated GUI agents across mobile, web and desktop platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that cross-platform collaboration improves performance and identify platform and OS as the most influential factors. |
KidsArtBench: Multi-Dimensional Children’s Art Evaluation with Attribute-Aware MLLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show impressive capabilities across visual–language tasks, but their capacity to evaluate artistic expression remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an attribute-specific multi-LoRA approach where each attribute corresponds to a distinct evaluation dimension in the scoring rubric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach increases correlation from 0.468 to 0.653 on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with the largest gains on perceptual dimensions and narrowed gaps on higher-order attributes. |
ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiqi Zhang, Xinbei Ma, Yunqing Xu, Zouying Cao, Pengrui Lu, Haobo Yuan, Tiancheng Shen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Ming-Hsuan Yang
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
Efficient Prior-Guided Reasoning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation under Conflicts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) however, performance degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency and noise. |
SSR: Utilizing Simplified Stance Reasoning Process for Robust Stance Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection are task-agnostic, which fail to utilize task knowledge to better discriminate between genuine and bias features. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate stance reasoning process as task knowledge to aid in learning genuine features without using targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than previous task-agnostic debiasing methods on new test sets. |
Three Sentences Are All You Need: Local Path Enhanced Document Relation Extraction (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (RE) is more challenging than sentence RE as it often requires reasoning over multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to heuristically select evidence sentences for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily combined with BiLSTM to achieve good performance on benchmark datasets even better than fancy graph neural network based methods. |
Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions . authors propose a method to mitigate false premises hallucinosity . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to constrain false premise attention heads during the model inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by constraining false premise attention heads . it yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance . |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and Skimming (2026.acl-long)
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Jiwei Tang, Shilei Liu, Zhicheng Zhang, Qingsong Lv, Runsong Zhao, Tingwei Lu, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Yujin Yuan, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing task-aware methods require loading the entire input sequence at once for compression, which suffer from computational inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy to reduce computational inefficiency and redundant information in long-context scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAM outperforms baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks while delivering up to a 12x speedup on long inputs. |
FEED PETs: Further Experimentation and Expansion on the Disambiguation of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (2023.starsem-1)
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Patrick Lee, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Alain Trujillo, Yuan Zhao, Olumide Ojo, Diana Plancarte, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng
| Challenge: | Existing work on euphemism disambiguation tasks has focused on transformers . euphorias are expressions that soften the message they convey, therefore dictionary-based approaches are ineffective . |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate PETs for vagueness and use transformers to classify PETs . they perform euphemism disambiguation experiments in three different languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well in English euphemism disambiguation task . preliminary results will be used to launch future work . |
Effective Sequence-to-Sequence Dialogue State Tracking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using Sequence-to-Sequence models for dialogue state tracking remains an understudied topic. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-training objective and a dialogue context representation to investigate this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more effective than auto-regressive language modeling, the authors show . the proposed model may have a hard time recovering from earlier mistakes, they say . |
See the World, Discover Knowledge: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jihao Gu, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Chen Wang, Ziming Wang, Tengtao Song, Donglai Wei, Jiale Yuan, Yingxiu Zhao, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Meng Cao, Jun Song, Yingshui Tan, Xiang Li, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision language models do not fully reflect their knowledge capacity and reliability, resulting in erroneous outputs that do not align with the image content or provide answers lacking knowledge evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based benchmark for visual factuality across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics and a multi-hop question construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world and discovering knowledge. |
CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System (2021.acl-demo)
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Kun Zhou, Xiaolei Wang, Yuanhang Zhou, Chenzhan Shang, Yuan Cheng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yaliang Li, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on conversational recommender systems lack a unified and standardized implementation or comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a unified framework and highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework collects 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implements 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models. |
Quantifying the Impact of Structured Output Format on Large Language Models through Causal Inference (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have examined the impact of structured output on LLMs’ generation quality, often presenting one-way findings. |
| Approach: | They propose to derive five potential causal structures characterizing the influence of structured output on LLMs’ generation using one assumed and two guaranteed constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be extended to other modules and is not limited to structured output but can be used in industrial applications. |
GradOT: Training-free Gradient-preserving Offsite-tuning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Kai Yao, Zhaorui Tan, Penglei Gao, Lichun Li, Kaixin Wu, Yinggui Wang, Yuan Zhao, Yixin Ji, Jianke Zhu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for offsite-tuning of large language models require high computational costs and lack theoretical analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose an offsite-tuning approach that selectively applies compression techniques such as rank compression and channel pruning to preserve the gradients of fine-tuned adapters while ensuring privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing OT methods in privacy protection and model performance. |
Leveraging Argumentation Knowledge Graph for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches focus on sentence matching but the interaction of opinions requires reasoning of knowledge, which is beyond textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external knowledge to enhance the identification of interactive argument pairs by analyzing the discussion thread of the target topic in an online forum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the benchmark dataset. |
ReMamba: Equip Mamba with Effective Long-Sequence Modeling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mamba models demonstrate superior inference efficiency and competitive performance on short-context tasks, but their capacity to comprehend long contexts is limited compared to transformer-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which incorporates selective compression and adaptation techniques within a two-stage re-forward process, incurring minimal additional inference costs overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the LongBench and L-Eval benchmarks by 3.2 and 1.6 points and attains performance almost on par with same-size transformer models. |
An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the generalizability of KPG models with other models by analyzing the most crucial factors that may affect their generalizarability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to predict keyphrases from a set of input sequences, and it can be compared with existing models. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
VisCGEC: Benchmarking the Visual Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese grammatical error correction ignore multi-modality and faked errors, which pushes techniques far away from real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark Chinese grammatical error correction for Chinese as a foreign language learner (CFL) using a dataset, they propose to use two CGEC frameworks to conduct experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an F 0.5 score of only 28.9%. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weihong Zhong, Xiaocheng Feng, Liang Zhao, Qiming Li, Lei Huang, Yuxuan Gu, Weitao Ma, Yuan Xu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from multimodal hallucinations . however, the generated hallucines could influence the models’ subsequent generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations and a method to revise the output distribution of LVLs with the one derived from the residual visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the performance of open-source LVLMs by 31%, indicating that they are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. |
Bring Invariant to Variant: A Contrastive Prompt-based Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph forecasting are insufficient structural contexts to learn effective representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Prompt-based framework with Entity background information for TKG forecasting that brings time-invariant entity background information to time-variant structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and stays competitive in inference with limited structural information. |
Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
FineRAG: Fine-grained Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-image generation still exhibit limitations in terms of knowledge access. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained retrieval-augmented image generation model that breaks down the retrieval task into four critical stages: query decomposition, candidate selection, retrieval augmented diffusion, and self-reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces noise associated with retrieval-augmented image generation and performs better in complex, open-world scenarios. |
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao, Rosella Galindo Esparza, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-resource questions pose a significant challenge within the field of Question-Answering (QA) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large models' internal knowledge to enhance the quality of augmented data by Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing augmentation strategies on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using structured attention, a model can learn dialogue structure in unsupervised fashion. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns semantic structures similar to templates used to generate a dialogue corpus on two-party datasets and on multi-party dialogues, disentangling dialogues without human annotation. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
Improving Zero-shot LLM Re-Ranker with Risk Minimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective Query Likelihood Models, but their estimation is biased and the model's accuracy is poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages Bayesian decision theory to quantify and mitigate this bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves re-ranking, especially in improving the Top-1 accuracy. |
Look before You Leap: Dual Logical Verification for Knowledge-based Visual Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual question generation focus on leveraging the semantics of inputs to propose questions, ignoring the logical coherence between generated questions and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical verification method that checks logical structure between Q, images, answers and acquired outside knowledge by incorporating logical coherence between Q and Q twice in the whole procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate diverse and insightful knowledge-based visual questions on two common datasets. |
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lujie Niu, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Fangkun Zhao, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based Multi-Agent System benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. |
Show, Don’t Tell: Demonstrations Outperform Descriptions for Schema-Guided Task-Oriented Dialogue (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has leveraged natural language descriptions of schema elements to enable universal dialogue systems; however, descriptions only indirectly convey schema semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use schema-guided modeling to prompt seq2seq models with a labeled example dialogue to show schema semantics rather than tell them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models using short examples as schema representations on two popular dialogue state tracking benchmarks. |
Exploiting Contextual Knowledge in LLMs through 𝒱-usable Information based Layer Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance the context-faithfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs) ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs’ internal representations by employing V-usable information analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves context-faithfulness generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge. |
MEDs for PETs: Multilingual Euphemism Disambiguation for Potentially Euphemistic Terms (2024.findings-eacl)
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Patrick Lee, Alain Chirino Trujillo, Diana Cuevas Plancarte, Olumide Ojo, Xinyi Liu, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Yuan Zhao, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng
| Challenge: | Euphemisms are a linguistic device used to soften or neutralize language that may otherwise be harsh or awkward to state directly. |
| Approach: | They train a multilingual transformer model to disambiguate potentially euphemistic terms in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than monolingual models on the disambiguation task compared to monolingual ones in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. |
Scaling Laws or Threshold Effects: Exploring the Optimal Vocabulary Size for Balancing Performance and Efficiency in Low-Resource Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | vocab expansion scaling laws are well-established for high-resource languages, but they remain unverified in low-resourced settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale trilingual vocabulary for languages with 140 to 195,000 tokens . they find that BBPE follows a "decline-then-rise" pattern, whereas BPE improves monotonically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed configuration reduces pre-training duration by over 71% across 1.5B to 8B models while improving downstream performance. |
Modeling discourse cohesion for discourse parsing via memory network (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to discourse parsing focus on studying the semantic and syntactic aspects of EDU pairs, but they do not address long span dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new transition-based discourse parser that takes discourse cohesion into account by using memory networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional features and improves performance on the RST discourse treebank. |
Global Attention Decoder for Chinese Spelling Error Correction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese spelling error correction focus on local contextual information, thus misleading the user and reducing performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a global attention decoder that learns the global relationship of correct input characters and candidates of potential error characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all competitor models by a large margin of up to 6.2% on three human-annotated datasets. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
GUICourse: From General Vision Language Model to Versatile GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Wentong Chen, Junbo Cui, Jinyi Hu, Yujia Qin, Junjie Fang, Yue Zhao, Chongyi Wang, Jun Liu, Guirong Chen, Yupeng Huo, Yuan Yao, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are a pivotal medium for human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of datasets for training visual-based GUI agents using general VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUICourse datasets show that even a small-sized GUI agent performs better on GUI tasks. |
MELOV: Multimodal Entity Linking with Optimized Visual Features in Latent Space (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal entity linking focus on textual contexts but lack in social media vision modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent space vision feature optimization framework MELOV to address these challenges . they exploit variational autoencoder to mine shared information and generate text-based visual features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing methods on three benchmark datasets. |
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a test suite to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suite incorporates six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies. |
Unveiling the Deficiencies of Pre-trained Text-and-Layout Models in Real-world Visually-rich Document Information Extraction (2026.findings-eacl)
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Chong Zhang, Yixi Zhao, Yulu Xie, Chenshu Yuan, Yi Tu, Ya Guo, Mingxu Chai, Ziyu Shen, Yue Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | PTLMs have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks . however, their performance in real-world scenarios falls short of expectations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use an entity-centric dataset to evaluate PTLMs' performance . they find that inadequate annotations in benchmark datasets lead to spurious correlations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset disentangles the falsely-coupled segment and entity annotations that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD. |
Discerning and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts through Adaptive Decoding with Contextual Information-Entropy Constraint (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding methods for large language models (LLMs) are specialized in resolving knowledge conflicts and could inadvertently deteriorate performance in absence of conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive decoding method to discern whether knowledge conflicts occur and resolve them by a contextual information-entropy constraint decoding technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model’s faithfulness to conflicting context and maintains high performance among non-conflicting contexts. |
Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chong Zhang, Yi Tu, Yixi Zhao, Chenshu Yuan, Huan Chen, Yue Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ya Guo, Huijia Zhu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing models of layout reading order do not convey the complete reading order information in the layout. |
| Approach: | They propose to model layout reading order as ordering relations over layout elements . they propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a visual-rich document dataset and on eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA tasks without targeted optimization. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering via Distinguishing Superficially Similar Instances (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing VQA models rely on the superficial correlation between question type and frequent answers to make predictions, without really understanding the input. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between superficially similar instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2 . it explicitly encourages the model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances . |
On the In-context Generation of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have the ability of in-context generation (ICG) when given an in-text prompt, they can implicitly recognize the pattern of the examples and complete the prompt in the desired way. |
| Approach: | They propose a plausible latent variable model to model the distribution of pretrained corpora and formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the distribution of pretrained corpora and then formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer through Reversible Transliteration: A Huffman-Based Approach for Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models demonstrate cross-lingual transfer capabilities, but these capabilities often fail to extend to low-resource languages, especially those utilizing non-Latin scripts. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine character transliteration with Huffman coding to create a complete transliterations framework that can be extended to other low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces storage requirements and improves accuracy and accuracy across multiple downstream tasks while maintaining performance on high-resource languages. |
Shorten After You’re Right: Lazy Length Penalties for Reasoning RL (2026.findings-acl)
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Danlong Yuan, Tian Xie, Shaohan Huang, Huishuai Zhang, Zhuocheng Gong, Chong Luo, Furu Wei, Dongyan Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing shortening methods for long reasoning models rely on additional supervision or multi-stage post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a lazy length penalty that imposes length pressure on models without extra training stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces response length without extra training stages while maintaining or improving performance. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
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Guangming Qin, Yuhao Deng, Yukun Zhao, Zhenyang Li, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang, Yizhou Yan, Chengliang Chai, Lei Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
Difficult Task Yes but Simple Task No: Unveiling the Laziness in Multimodal LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research indicates that even state-of-the-art MLLMs still suffer from some straightforward visual question-answering (VQA) problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model-based benchmark to investigate model laziness to identify models that err when answering simple visual questions about an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model laziness is found to be widespread in current MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-pro, Claude 3, LLaVA-1.5, LLva-1.6, and QWen-VL. |
Disentangling Reasoning Logic to Resolve Explicit Knowledge Conflicts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to resolve explicit knowledge conflicts are based on semantic decoding and auxiliary embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves on existing models. |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
MavenCoder: Competitive Code Generation via Model Adaptive Planning Strategies and Multi-Perspective Verification Enhancement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced automated program synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-adaptive and verification–enhanced framework for competition-level code generation that leverages adaptive assessment aligned with the model’s capabilities to select planning strategies while providing timely feedback and correction via multi-perspective verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on livecodebench, humanEval+, MBPP+, and codecontests, and achieves pass@1 results exceeding 3%–40%. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
VisBias: Measuring Explicit and Implicit Social Biases in Vision Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and addressing potential social biases is essential to prevent harm to users. |
| Approach: | They examine explicit and implicit biases exhibited by Vision-Language Models . they pose questions related to gender and racial differences to test their models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are used in image description tasks, form completion tasks and medical applications. |
Interpretability of LLM Classifiers via the Rational Inattention Theory with Application to Hate Speech Detection (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on text classification, but their decision strategies need to be better understood. |
| Approach: | They propose an extended rational inattention model that parameterizes linguistic noise and information processing cost and provides an interpretable behavioral framework for black-box LLM classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides an interpretable behavioral framework for black-box LLM classifiers. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level adversarial approaches for textual data have various limitations due to the large search space consisting of combinations of candidate words. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to original texts without perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets compared with state-of-the-art approaches. |
POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversion (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Liu, Zhongyin Zhao, Le Tian, Haicheng Wang, Xubing Ye, Yangxiu You, Zilin Yu, Chuhan Wu, Zhou Xiao, Yang Yu, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training document conversion models with manual annotation are costly and time-consuming, and training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and improves on annotated documents. |
Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GUI agents are susceptible to environmental distractions. |
| Approach: | They propose a scenario where both user and agent are benign and environment is not malicious . they implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves faithfulness of multimodal large language model agents in a graphical user interface environment. |
Question Generation Based on Grammar Knowledge and Fine-grained Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research on question generation has achieved great success, but some question types and answers did not match. |
| Approach: | They construct a question type classifier and a query generator to solve the problem of question types not matching with other questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy of interrogative words in generated questions. |
Incorporating Object-Level Visual Context for Multimodal Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-grained entity typing is superior to text-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called fine-grained entity typing to classify entities . they propose combining textual and visual contexts to capture fine-granular semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior classification performance compared to previous text-based approaches. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Does Recommend-Revise Produce Reliable Annotations? An Analysis on Missing Instances in DocRED (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction is a challenging task as it requires reasoning across multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a recommend-revise scheme to reduce the workload of annotators by providing them with candidate relation instances from distant supervision to supplement and remove relational facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first large-scale and human-annotated dataset for relation extraction. |
Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a task of assigning entity mentions to referent entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ultra-fine-grained type information to improve the generalization ability of EL models by utilizing a low-level task to extract ultra-finish entity type information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the zero-shot entity linking task . |
AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu
| Challenge: | a neuro-symbolic approach allows zero-shot adaptation to unseen tasks and domains . a neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation and a symbolic program implements dialog policy is executed to recommend actions. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end, zero-shot task-oriented dialog system . it is designed to adapt to unseen tasks or domains without prior training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be programmed to adapt to unseen tasks without training . it reduces data collection and training requirements for enabling new TOD 1 16189 tasks . |
TreeMAN: Tree-enhanced Multimodal Attention Network for ICD Coding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to automatically assign ICD codes ignore crucial information contained in structured medical data, which is hard to be captured from the noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Tree-enhanced multimodal attention network to fuse tabular features and textual features into multimodal representations by enhancing the text representations with tree-based features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two MIMIC datasets. |
A Span-based Multimodal Variational Autoencoder for Semi-supervised Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition on social media are not efficient for semi-supervised MNER because of the mismatch between the posted text and image. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to fuse the text and image features for multimodal named entity recognition under semi-supervised setting by exploiting modal-specific VAEs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines under supervised setting and improves performance with less labeled data than existing semi-supervised methods. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| 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. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for KG-to-text generation are based on pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically generate a text that describes the facts in knowledge graph (KG) they leverage the excellent capacities of pretrained language models (PLMs) in language understanding and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all comparison methods on fully-supervised and fewshot settings. |
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Yu Zi Wei, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks. |
RefGPT: Dialogue Generation of GPT, by GPT, and for GPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate huge truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. |
PaperScope: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Benchmark for Agentic Deep Research Across Massive Scientific Papers (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single-document understanding, whereas real scientific workflows require integrating evidence from multiple papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-document benchmark for agentic deep research that integrates evidence from multiple documents. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that even advanced systems achieve limited scores on PaperScope . paper provides a rigorous benchmark alongside a pipeline for constructing large multi-modal, multi-source deep research datasets. |