Papers by Yuchen Zhang
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhao, Pingjie Wang, Liudan Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Ya Zhang, Kun Sun, Xin Sun, Xin Zhou, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds. |
Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yueyang Cang, Xiaoteng Zhang, Erlu Zhao, Zehua Ji, Yuhang Liu, Yuchen He, Zhiyuan Ning, Chen Yijun, Wenge Que, Li Shi
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to optimize communication topology rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology optimization framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on reasoning and code generation benchmarks. |
TC–RAG: Turing–Complete RAG’s Case study on Medical LLM Systems (2025.acl-long)
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Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Rihong Qiu, Haoyu Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Hao Chen, Wentao Zhang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yuchen Fang, Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RAG neglect system state variables, resulting in poor performance and erroneous knowledge accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates a Turing Complete System to manage state variables and manage retrieval halting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on seven real-world healthcare datasets and shows that it is more accurate than existing methods. |
Do Large Language Models excel in Complex Logical Reasoning with Formal Language? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs have focused on formal language, but evaluations of their performance are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a formal language to evaluate LLMs across logical reasoning problems using formal languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Instruct models in three dimensions, taxonomy of tasks, and format of trajectories, and achieves the best generalization performance across other languages. |
Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Principled Alignment with MoE Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Feng, Zhenyu Zhang, Naibin Gu, Ziqi Wang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a cornerstone for scaling LLMs, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood, often leading to sub-optimal specialization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Helmholtz Free Energy and Router Entropy to study the MoE lifecycle and identify a universal Three-Stage Phase Transition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces perplexity and improves expert distinctiveness, offering a principled path toward thermodynamically aligned computation. |
Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis (2020.tacl-1)
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Jacob Andreas, John Bufe, David Burkett, Charles Chen, Josh Clausman, Jean Crawford, Kate Crim, Jordan DeLoach, Leah Dorner, Jason Eisner, Hao Fang, Alan Guo, David Hall, Kristin Hayes, Kellie Hill, Diana Ho, Wendy Iwaszuk, Smriti Jha, Dan Klein, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Theo Lanman, Percy Liang, Christopher H. Lin, Ilya Lintsbakh, Andy McGovern, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Adam Pauls, Dmitrij Petters, Brent Read, Dan Roth, Subhro Roy, Jesse Rusak, Beth Short, Div Slomin, Ben Snyder, Stephon Striplin, Yu Su, Zachary Tellman, Sam Thomson, Andrei Vorobev, Izabela Witoszko, Jason Wolfe, Abby Wray, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Zotov
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue represent dialogue state as a dataflow graph . microsoft's SMCalFlow dataset features complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataflow graph-based dialogue agent that maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves representability and predictability in natural dialogues . it uses dataflow graphs and metacomputation to map user intents to a program . |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
Make Imagination Clearer! Stable Diffusion-based Visual Imagination for Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.acl-long)
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Andong Chen, Yuchen Song, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Muyun Yang, Liqiang Nie, Jie Liu, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing multimodal MT and text-only MT. |
| Approach: | They propose a stable diffusion-based imagination network into a multimodal large language model to generate an image for each source sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing multimodal and text-only MT and achieves an average improvement of 14 BLEU points on Multi30K and MSCOCO multimodal MT benchmarks. |
PRISM: Probabilistic Reward Model with Inherent Structural Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluators compress diverse human judgments into a single scalar, leading to brittle alignment and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian-based reinterpretation of reward evaluation as a conditional distribution and a mixture of Gaussians to capture conflicting preference dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms scalar baselines in accuracy and generalization. |
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liang, Ruitong Liu, Yuying Li, Qifeng Cai, Jingxuan Wei, Yuchen Wu, Bihui Yu, Xiangxiang Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ran Xu, Wenqi Shi, Yue Yu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yanqiao Zhu, May Dongmei Wang, Joyce Ho, Chao Zhang, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedically tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedic data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedically corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets confirm the performance of the retrieval model on various biomedically demanding tasks. |
Calibrated Language Model Fine-Tuning for In- and Out-of-Distribution Data (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models suffer from severe miscalibration for both in-distribution and out-of-difference data due to over-parameterization. |
| Approach: | They propose a regularized method to improve in-distribution and out-of-distance calibrations by using on-manifold regularization and off-manfold regularisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for text classification in terms of expectation calibration error, misclassification detection, and OOD detection on six datasets. |
Are AI-Generated Text Detectors Robust to Adversarial Perturbations? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors for AI-generated text lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model’s robustness against adversarial perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baseline methods on four datasets and is more generalizable in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. |
OptiVerse: A Comprehensive Benchmark towards Optimization Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on Mathematical Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, hindering comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that compares 1,000 curated optimization problems across three difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on hard problems while maintaining 27% accuracy. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Shi, Ran Xu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Jieyu Zhang, Hang Wu, Yuanda Zhu, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | EHRAgent enables clinicians to interact with EHRs using natural language . reliance on rule-based conversion systems often necessitates additional training or effort from data engineers. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model agent that generates and executes code in natural language to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate on three real-world EHR datasets. |
On Fake News Detection with LLM Enhanced Semantics Mining (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting fake news use only news embeddings to capture the lexical semantics between tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-based model with prompts to extract news embeddings from LLMs and a generalized page-rank model to extract local and global semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows superior performance on five benchmark datasets over seven baseline methods. |
UnClE: Explicitly Leveraging Semantic Similarity to Reduce the Parameters of Word Embeddings (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce word embedding parameters ignore semantic information . existing methods do not consider semantic information, allowing for performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages semantic similarity with weight sharing to reduce dimensionality of word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces word embedding parameters by more than 11x on a standard English-German dataset. |
Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT - A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a number of open-source large language models claim to be performing better than commercial ones . however, these models fall short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5 . |
| Approach: | They evaluate six popular large language models against each other to evaluate their performance . authors say open-source models are not as effective as those built by commercial models . |
| Outcome: | a new set of models claim to match or surpass the language understanding abilities of commercial models . the results show that the models performed far below the performance of closed-source models compared to open-source ones . |
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Yizhou Liu, Yuchen Yan, Jin Ma, Xu Tan, Yao Hu, Daoxin Zhang, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% . |
DictLLM: Harnessing Key-Value Data Structures with Large Language Models for Enhanced Medical Diagnostics (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Structured data processing is a complex and complex process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures heterogeneity of structured data using large language models . they propose group positional encoding, hierarchical attention bias and optimal transport alignment layer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and few-shot GPT-4 on a medical lab report dataset. |
GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative paradigm for translation tasks that integrates the diverse translation versions in N-best list. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on speech and machine translation benchmarks on various languages. |
WorkForceAgent-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLM-based Web Agents via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents relying on supervised fine-tuning struggle with generalization and robustness due to insufficient reasoning capabilities when handling the inherently dynamic nature of web interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered web agent that trains using a rule-based reinforcement learning framework to enhance single-step reasoning and planning for business-oriented web navigation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline LLM-based agents on the WorkArena benchmark by 10.26–16.59%. |
Intent-Aware and Hate-Mitigating Counterspeech Generation via Dual-Discriminator Guided LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Hate speech is an aggressive expression that incites hatred towards specific groups based on their group identity. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLMs-based framework for counterspeech generation that uses intent-aware discriminators to decode intents of LLM models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches intents with hate mitigation intents and performs well. |
HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification . the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-generation-based framework that uses language models to encode dynamic text representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods while handling data and mitigating class imbalance. |
Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing (2021.acl-long)
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Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Subhro Roy, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Kyte, Alan Guo, Sam Thomson, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Jason Wolfe, Jacob Andreas, Dan Klein
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on rich representations of dialogue history that include all previously generated components of the output. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 7.3% and 10.6% on SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets. |
AutoAct: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch for QA via Self-Planning (2024.acl-long)
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Shuofei Qiao, Ningyu Zhang, Runnan Fang, Yujie Luo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Jiang, Chengfei Lv, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing language agent systems struggle with costly data reliance and need multiple models for multiple functions. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic agent learning framework for QA that synthesizes planning trajectories without human intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on question-answering tasks with a division-of-labor strategy. |
Counterfactual Generator: A Weakly-Supervised Method for Named Entity Recognition (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using labeled data, named entity recognition is labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which decomposes named entity into two parts: entity and context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization ability of models under limited observational examples. |
AskToAct: Enhancing LLMs Tool Use via Self-Correcting Clarification (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xuan Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Zhe Zheng, Linjuan Wu, Wenqi Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang, Weiming Lu
| Challenge: | Existing tools for ambiguous and incomplete queries are limited by manual construction and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits the mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions by removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. |
LogicPro: Improving Complex Logical Reasoning via Program-Guided Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Jin Jiang, Yuchen Yan, Yang Liu, Jianing Wang, Shuai Peng, Xunliang Cai, Yixin Cao, Mengdi Zhang, Liangcai Gao
| Challenge: | LogicPro is a data synthesis method that uses LeetCode-style algorithm problems and their corresponding Program solutions to generate complex logic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method which leverages LeetCode-style algorithm Problems and their corresponding Program solutions to synthesize complex logic data in text format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models for BBH27, LogicBench, DROP, AR-LSAT, and GSM8K, and a wide range of reasoning datasets. |
CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Teng Pan, Yuchen Yan, Zixuan Wang, Ruiqing Zhang, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision . |
DSVD: Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding for Faithful Generation in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reliability of large language models often lack self-correction or use costly post-hoc verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding framework that enhances generation reliability through real-time hallucination detection and efficient error correction. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across five benchmarks show the proposed framework improves truthfulness and factual accuracy. |
Rethinking Masked Language Modeling for Chinese Spelling Correction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing CSC models over-fit the error model while under-fitting the language model, resulting in poor generalization to out-of-distribution error patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-domain benchmark LEMON to assess the open domain generalization of Chinese Spelling Correction models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on SIGHAN, ECSpell, and LEMON. |
Backdooring Neural Code Search (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural code search models are used to find code snippets from online repositories . however, their security aspect is rarely studied . |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf code snippets from online repositories to find desired code . they propose to inject a backdoor into neural code search models which return buggy code if attacker modifies one variable/function name . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms baselines on two neural code search models by 60%. |
Language Family Matters: Evaluating SpeechLLMs Across Linguistic Boundaries (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate speech encoders with large language models (LLMs) have limited resources and lack linguistic relatedness. |
| Approach: | They propose a connector-sharing strategy based on linguistic family membership that allows one connector per family to share a frozen speech encoder with a pretrained LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces parameter count while improving generalization across domains, compared with existing connectors. |
Cultivating Forensic Reasoning for Generalizable Multimodal Manipulation Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for manipulation detection and grounding focus on manipulator type classification under result-oriented supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-driven framework that shifts learning from outcome fitting to process modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art with superior generalization on large-scale datasets. |
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. |
ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and Select (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Our proposed method extracts N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes the task into two stages . they propose modal query and modal entity selection . their results show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three scientific information extraction datasets. |
Neural Ranking Models for Temporal Dependency Structure Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new neural temporal dependency parser is being developed for news reports and narrative stories . a similar system is used for other NLP applications such as timeline construction . |
| Approach: | They build a neural temporal dependency parser that parses time expressions and events in a text . their results shed light on the nature of temporal relation structures in different domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model beats baselines on news reports and narrative stories on two data domains. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
Solver-Independent Automated Problem Formulation via LLMs for High-Cost Simulation-Driven Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to translating ambiguous design requirements into a mathematical optimization formulation are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a solver-independent framework that converts engineers’ natural language requirements into executable optimization models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the accuracy of requirement formalization and quality of resulting radiation efficiency curves on antenna design. |
DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rongzhi Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Liang Qiu, Haoming Jiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Qingru Zhang, Hyokun Yun, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are noisy and varying in importance of preference samples. |
| Approach: | a new method enhances reward modeling by learning to dynamically weigh preference data. |
| Outcome: | a new method improves the performance of large language models with human preferences . it initializes data importance and iteratively refines them to maximize validation performance. |
Discrete Cross-Modal Alignment Enables Zero-Shot Speech Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot methods fail to align speech and text into a shared semantic space . Existing methods require expensive and expensive parallel ST data . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a shared discrete vocabulary space to align speech and text into a common space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the SOTA and even performs on par with the strong supervised ST baselines. |
What Matters in Training a GPT4-Style Language Model with Multimodal Inputs? (2024.naacl-long)
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Yan Zeng, Hanbo Zhang, Jiani Zheng, Jiangnan Xia, Guoqiang Wei, Yang Wei, Yuchen Zhang, Tao Kong, Ruihua Song
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GPT-4V have demonstrated remarkable multi-modal capabilities in processing image inputs and following open-ended instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play technique to enhance multi-modal LLMs . they propose 'lynx' to train multi-modal LLM models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves understanding accuracy and instruction-following proficiency of multi-modal models. |
An Exploratory Study on Model Compression for Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL translates user queries into SQL statements that can retrieve relevant answers from relational databases. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply model compression techniques to sketch-based and sequence-to-sequence Text-toSQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have higher inference efficiency and respond better to model compression than sequence-to-sequence models. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
M3ED: Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue Database (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data resources to support multimodal affective analysis in dialogues are limited in scale and diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal multi-scene multi-label Emotional Dialogue dataset, M3ED, which contains 990 dyadic emotional dialogues from 56 different TV series. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 990 dyadic emotional dialogues from 56 different TV series, a total of 9,082 turns and 24,449 utterances. |
Synchronously Generating Two Languages with Interactive Decoding (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multilingual NMT models handle multiple language pairs in one model. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive approach to translate a source language into two different languages simultaneously and interactively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on IWSLT and WMT datasets. |
ReGen: Zero-Shot Text Classification via Training Data Generation with Progressive Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large pretrained language models can generate training data with no task-specific or cross-task data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-enhanced framework to create training data from a general-domain unlabeled corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4.3% gain over baselines and saves 70% of time compared with baselines using large language models. |
BlonDe: An Automatic Evaluation Metric for Document-level Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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Yuchen Jiang, Tianyu Liu, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Jian Yang, Haoyang Huang, Rico Sennrich, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Standard evaluation metrics, e.g., BLEU, TER and METEOR, focus on the quality of translations at the sentence level and do not consider discourse-level features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a metric to take discourse coherence into consideration by categorizing discourse-related spans and calculating the similarity-based F1 measure of categorized spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric possesses better selectivity and interpretability at the document-level, and is more sensitive to document- level nuances. |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
CAPC-CG: A Large-Scale, Expert-Directed LLM-Annotated Corpus of Adaptive Policy Communication in China (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Adaptive policy communication is a theory of governance in large, decentralized organizations where leaders exercise influence rather than precise control by combining clear and ambiguous instructions to calibrate discipline and flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-directed annotation method that integrates codebook design, structured training, a two-step workflow, and LLM-based scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a Fleiss’ kappa of 0.86 on directive labels, indicating high reliability. |
Easy Dataset: A Unified and Extensible Framework for Synthesizing LLM Fine-Tuning Data from Unstructured Documents (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis tools struggle to extract reliable fine-tuning data from heterogeneous documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing fine-tuning data from unstructured documents via an intuitive graphical user interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract reliable data from unstructured documents via an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) it leverages persona-driven prompting approach to generate diverse question-answer pairs using public-available LLMs. |
Unsupervised Grammatical Error Correction Rivaling Supervised Methods (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art grammatical error correction systems rely on labeled data . current systems require manual correction and require a large quantity of labeles . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method to build a grammatical error correction system using a fixer and a critic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms previous unsupervised systems on English and Chinese GEC. |
PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | We introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . despite being trained on synthetic data, PaSA outperforms existing baselines on RealScholarQuery . |
| Approach: | They introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . they optimize PaSA using a synthetic dataset, AutoScholarQuery, which includes 35k fine-grained queries . |
| Outcome: | The paper analyzes the performance of a paper search agent using a synthetic dataset . it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks on RealScholarQuery . |
FinChart-Bench: Benchmarking Financial Chart Comprehension in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | FinChart-Bench is the first benchmark specifically focused on real-world financial charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically focused on real-world financial charts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates 26 state-of-the-art LVLMs on FinChart-Bench. |
Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References (2024.naacl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Hongyuan Lu, Yuchen Jiang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tom Kocmi, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks with limited references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model’s hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enrich evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of a single reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
Challenging the Explanation Based on Preceding Tokens: Discovering Transferable Non-Literal Biasing (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | et al. (2017) show that the generated preceding tokens may push the large language model towards the target answer. |
| Approach: | They find that generated preceding tokens may push large language models towards the target answer . they suggest that the LLM may intentionally use the semantically unrelated tokens to help generation of the target . |
| Outcome: | The generated preceding tokens may push the large language model towards the target answer . the biased connotations of the target response can also transfer to other prompts . |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Exemplar Selection in Task-oriented Dialogue System (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that HESIT effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting by exemplar selection, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest CL benchmark of ToDs in terms of all metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to overcome catastrophic forgetting in task-oriented dialogue systems by tracing their hyper-gradients and a retraining strategy that uses influential exemplars for periodic retrains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the largest CL benchmark of ToDs in terms of all metrics. |
Dual-Cluster Memory Agent: Resolving Multi-Paradigm Ambiguity in Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with structural ambiguity in optimization problems, where a single problem admits multiple related but conflicting modeling paradigms, hindering effective solution generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use memory to leverage historical solutions in a training-free manner to enhance performance by leveraging generalizable guidance knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves an average performance improvement of 11%-21% over previous agents. |
Continual Few-shot Intent Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing intent detection systems are trained with lots of labeled data over a predefined set of intent classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-guided lightweight encoder with three auxiliary strategies to prevent catastrophic forgetting and negative knowledge transfer across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system prevents catastrophic forgetting and encourages positive knowledge transfer across tasks. |
Structured Interpretation of Temporal Relations (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Temporal relations between events and time expressions are often modeled in an unstructured manner, resulting in inconsistent and incomplete annotation and computational modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation approach where events and time expressions form a dependency tree in which each dependency relation corresponds to an instance of temporal anaphora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach annotates 235 documents in news and narratives with 48 doubly annotated documents. |
POLYIE: A Dataset of Information Extraction from Polymer Material Scientific Literature (2024.naacl-long)
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Jerry Cheung, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Pranav Shetty, Wantian Zhao, Sanjeev Grampurohit, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | SciIE datasets for polymer materials are lacking for this class of materials . POLYIE is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a SciIE dataset for polymer materials that uses entity annotations from 146 full-length articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . it presents challenges due to diverse lexical formats of entities and ambiguity between entities . |
Are LLMs Rational Investors? A Study on the Financial Bias in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Zhou, Yuchen Ni, Zhiheng Xi, Zhangyue Yin, Yu He, Gan Yunhui, Xiang Liu, Zhang Jian, Sen Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Existing studies on biases within specific domains, such as finance, remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect, detect, analyze and mitigate financial biases in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces bias by 68% for the most biased model, according to key metrics. |
ROBBIE: Robust Bias Evaluation of Large Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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David Esiobu, Xiaoqing Tan, Saghar Hosseini, Megan Ung, Yuchen Zhang, Jude Fernandes, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Eleonora Presani, Adina Williams, Eric Smith
| Challenge: | generative large language models (LLMs) are becoming more performant and prevalent . we need tools to measure and improve their fairness, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose to compare 6 different prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be tested on more datasets to better characterize and mitigate biases . the study compared 6 prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative large language models. |
Logic Jailbreak: Efficiently Unlocking LLM Safety Restrictions Through Formal Logical Expression (2026.findings-acl)
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Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Nan Wang, Jiatong Li, Yuchen Li, Yuyang Ye, Wanyu Wang, Pengyue Jia, Kai Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Despite advances in aligning LLMs with human values, current safety mechanisms remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box jailbreak method that uses logical expression translation to bypass LLM safety mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the distributional gap between alignment data and logic-expressed inputs while preserving the underlying semantic intent and readability while evading safety constraints. |
Grounding Visual Illusions in Language: Do Vision-Language Models Perceive Illusions Like Humans? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Visual illusions are a phenomenon that is often seen in human perception but are not always faithful to the physical world. |
| Approach: | They build a dataset containing five types of visual illusions and formulate four tasks to examine visual illusion in state-of-the-art VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset reveals that larger models are closer to human perception and more susceptible to visual illusions. |
UniCreative: Unifying Long-form Logic and Short-form Sparkle via Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaolong Wei, Zerun Zhu, Simin Niu, Xingyu Zhang, Peiying Yu, Changxuan Xiao, Yuchen Li, Jicheng Yang, Zhejun Zhao, Chong Meng, Long Xia, Daiting Shi
| Challenge: | Existing alignment paradigms for creative writing use static reward signals and supervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reward model that synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns models with human preferences across content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. |