Papers by Yujiu Yang

45 papers
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering.
Approach: They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines.
CriticBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Critique-Correct Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: CriticBench is a benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ abilities to critique and refine their reasoning across a variety of tasks.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' ability to critique and correct reasoning across a variety of tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark examines the performance of 17 large language models in generation, critique, and correction reasoning.
A Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network for Sentiment Classification (P18-2)

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Challenge: Existing sentiment classification approaches do not fully exploit sentiment linguistic knowledge.
Approach: They propose a Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network to integrate sentiment linguistic knowledge into the deep neural network via attention mechanisms.
Outcome: The proposed network captures sentiments from different representation sub-spaces, and is superior to strong competitors.
MorphMark: Flexible Adaptive Watermarking for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for tracing text origins struggle with a watermark effectiveness dilemma . weaker watermarks preserve text quality, while stronger ones enhance effectiveness .
Approach: They propose a method that adjusts watermark strength in response to changes in a key factor . they first formalize the problem within a multi-objective trade-off analysis framework .
Outcome: The proposed method improves watermark effectiveness but reduces text quality . the proposed method prioritizes flexibility and time and space efficiency .
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements.
Approach: They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness .
Outcome: The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements.
ShifCon: Enhancing Non-Dominant Language Capabilities with a Shift-based Multilingual Contrastive Framework (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experiments show that ShifCon significantly enhances the performance of non-dominant languages due to the imbalance in training data across languages.
Approach: They propose a Shift-based multilingual Contrastive framework that aligns the internal forward process of other languages toward that of the dominant one.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves performance of non-dominant languages, particularly for low-resource ones.
PTD-SQL: Partitioning and Targeted Drilling with LLMs in Text-to-SQL (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for Text-to-SQL tasks . SQL solutions have a relatively fixed pattern, allowing for categorical thinking .
Approach: They propose that query group partitioning allows LLMs to focus on learning the thought processes specific to a single problem type, thus enhancing their reasoning abilities across diverse difficulty levels and problem categories.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the Spider and BIRD datasets.
ToolBeHonest: A Multi-level Hallucination Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Currently, tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) only achieve total scores of 45.3 and 37.0, respectively, on a scale of 100.
Approach: They propose a multi-level diagnostic process to assess the LLM's hallucinations through two perspectives: depth and breadth.
Outcome: The proposed diagnostic process assesses the hallucinations of large language models through two perspectives: depth and breadth.
A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Decoding methods are essential for converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers.
Approach: They propose to evaluate decoding methods in general-purpose large language models . they find that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent .
Outcome: The proposed methods perform task-dependently and are influenced by alignment, model size, and quantization.
CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Increasing saturation of web data limits further scaling of model intelligence.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate machine creativity in code generation that combines combinatorial and exploratory creativity through reverse engineering and self-play.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through reverse engineering and self-play.
Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Conversational Concept Flows (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that explicitly modeling concept flows with a large commonsense knowledge graph improves response quality, but there is a gap between the knowledge graph and the conversation.
Approach: They propose to model human conversational concept flows with a commonsense knowledge graph . they extract abundant concepts and relations from natural conversations and build a conversation-aware knowledge graph.
Outcome: The proposed method performs better than baselines on a large-scale reddit conversation dataset.
ToM: Leveraging Tree-oriented MapReduce for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show ToM outperforms existing divide-and-conquer frameworks . RAG relies on similarity-based rankings to retrieve and reason over chunks based on logical coherence .
Approach: They propose a Tree-oriented MapReduce framework for long-context reasoning . it leverages the hierarchical structure of long documents by constructing a DocTree .
Outcome: Experimental results show that ToM outperforms existing divide-and-conquer frameworks and RAGs . the proposed framework improves logical coherence and long-context reasoning on 70B+ LLMs compared to existing approaches .
LLM2: Let Large Language Models Harness System 2 Reasoning (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Empirical results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks substantiate the efficacy of Large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a framework that combines an LLM with a process-based verifier to generate plausible candidates and provide timely process-driven feedback to distinguish desirable and undesirable outputs.
Outcome: Empirical results show that LLM2 improves accuracy on GSM8K and self-consistency increases major@20 accuracy.
HGCN4MeSH: Hybrid Graph Convolution Network for MeSH Indexing (2020.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Recent deep learning methods for MeSH indexing fail to capture complex correlations between terms.
Approach: They propose a model to learn the relationship between MeSH terms using Graph Convolution Network (GCN) they use two biGRUs to learn embedding representations of abstract and title of MeSH index text .
Outcome: The proposed model is competitive with the state-of-the-art models on two datasets.
AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing research on information-seeking conversations is stymied by the lack of training data.
Approach: They propose to use autoconv for synthetic conversation generation to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and fine tune an LLM with a few human conversations to generate synthetic conversations with high quality.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two commonly-used datasets and alleviates the dependence on human annotation.
Invisible Entropy: Towards Safe and Efficient Low-Entropy LLM Watermarking (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to watermark low-entropy content are expensive and risky . IE reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods .
Approach: They propose a logit-based watermarking paradigm that uses entropy-based features to predict whether the next token is high or low.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods.
MIRTT: Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers for Visual Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing bilinear methods focus on inter-modality information between images and questions . existing models focus on the interaction between images, questions, and images .
Approach: They propose a trilinear interaction framework that incorporates attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modal relationships.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms bilinear models on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperformed baselines on the VQA, TDIUC and GQA datasets.
Probing the Safety Robustness of LLMs in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Despite substantial progress in safety alignment techniques, aligned large language models can still produce unsafe responses under minor internal perturbations.
Approach: They introduce Activation Steering Attack (ASA) and leverage the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) as a diagnostic signal to probe the local sensitivity of safety behaviors in latent space.
Outcome: The proposed method is model-agnostic and supervision-free, enabling a general and reproducible diagnostic metric for analyzing safety robustness.
EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing empathetic dialogue models lack emotion-dependent response generation . elaine mccartney: "i'm sorry to hear that! "
Approach: They propose a model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent intents . they aim to address the bias of the empathic intent distribution between epd models and humans .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on automatic and human evaluation.
From Evasion to Concealment: Stealthy Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to unlearning often treat nonsensical responses or template-based refusals as the unlearning target, making the process even more vulnerable to attacks and jailbreaks.
Approach: They propose a method that uses inverted facts to remove the need for auxiliary models or retaining data while avoiding leakage.
Outcome: Evaluated on the ToFU Knowledge Unlearning dataset using Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5, MEOW outperforms baselines in forgetting quality while preserving model utility.
SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, but such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model’s capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables detailed characterization of large language models through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation.
TextBind: Multi-turn Interleaved Multimodal Instruction-following in the Wild (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models with instruction-following capabilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence.
Approach: They propose an annotation-free framework for empowering large language models with instruction-following capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model.
DT-QDC: A Dataset for Question Comprehension in Online Test (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to measure difficulty of questions are not accurate enough to guide learning.
Approach: They propose to use a Chinese DT-QDC dataset to measure difficulty of questions and provide a new model that can improve the judgment of difficulty from different perspectives.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform baselines by 7.79% on F1-score and 15.92% on MAE, 28.26% on MSE, and 28.2% on MSC on the new DT-QDC dataset.
Text Anomaly Detection with Simplified Isolation Kernel (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: High-dimensional dense embeddings extracted by large language models pose memory requirements and high computation time.
Approach: They propose a method that maps high-dimensional dense embeddings to lower-dimensional sparse representations while preserving crucial anomaly characteristics.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better detection performance than 11 SOTA anomaly detection algorithms while maintaining computational efficiency and low memory cost.
Robust and Minimally Invasive Watermarking for EaaS (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing watermarking methods use a target embedding to create watermarks, but this method results in each embeddable having the same component, making it difficult to remove the watermark.
Approach: They propose to use embedding watermarks to protect EaaS from model extraction attacks . eaas is vulnerable to model extraction, highlighting the need for copyright protection .
Outcome: The proposed method can watermark embeddings against model extraction attacks without sacrificing the quality of the embeddables.
Mitigating Reversal Curse in Large Language Models via Semantic-aware Permutation Training (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks, but suffer from the "reversal curse" this limitation poses a challenge to the advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Approach: They propose to use training data to permute training sentences into entities and feed them into the model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) on reversed questions and improves existing models.
Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning focus on unit test feedback to construct preference pairs.
Approach: They propose a preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs.
Outcome: Experiments show that Preference Learning improves on BigCodeBench and BigCodeBind tasks.
ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Traditional fine-tuning ignores one-to-many nature of language, leading to overfitting . authors propose a method to fine- tune LLMs by leveraging tokens.
Approach: They propose a method to fine-tune Large Language Models by leveraging tokens to mask low-probability tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks.
MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies predict sentiment elements in a fixed order, which ignores the interdependence of the elements and the diversity of language expression.
Approach: They propose a multi-view process that aggregates sentiment elements generated in different order . they use element order prompts to guide the language model to generate multiple tuples with different element order based on a given text .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on 10 datasets of 4 benchmark tasks and is highly flexible and transferable across tasks.
InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: In order to perform downstream tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) need continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm that allows for continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting . they propose to replay previous data based on task similarity with instructions .
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance over 16 tasks with different training orders.
ICA-Proto: Iterative Cross Alignment Prototypical Network for Incremental Few-Shot Relation Classification (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for relation classification suffer from the scarcity of manually annotated data.
Approach: They propose a novel relation classification model that incorporates query representation into the encoding of novel prototypes and utilizes iteratively to achieve more interaction.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on two benchmark datasets.
Prior Relational Schema Assists Effective Contrastive Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs lack robustness and incompleteness to provide link prediction.
Approach: They propose to capture prior schema-level interactions related to relations by leveraging entity type information and introduce schema-guided negatives to bolster the efficiency of normal contrastive representation learning.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple established metrics across multiple datasets for link prediction.
SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: SciAgent surpasses other LLMs with the comparable size by more than 8.0% in absolute accuracy.
Approach: They propose a tool-augmented scientific reasoning setting that supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets and builds a benchmark to evaluate LLM’s abilities with tool assistance.
Outcome: The proposed setting augments LLMs with scalable toolsets and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user.
Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) can be used to solve math word problems, but they lack fast adaptivity as humans.
Approach: They propose a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving the math word problem . they use system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier to generate reasoning paths .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieves 9.6% improvement over baselines.
Edge-free but Structure-aware: Prototype-Guided Knowledge Distillation from GNNs to MLPs (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train low-latency multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) on graph tasks are based on graph nodes and lack graph structural information.
Approach: They propose to distill graph structural information from Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to low-latency multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) on graph tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method does not require graph edges (edge-free setting) yet learns structure-aware MLPs.
Chain-of-Reasoning: Towards Unified Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via a Multi-Paradigm Perspective (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work shows that LLMs rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks.
Approach: They propose a new framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms to enable synergistic collaboration.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms current SOTA models in theorem proving tasks and the MATH benchmark in arithmetic tasks.
Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Modern large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but struggle on complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent debate framework that encourages divergent thinking in LLMs . they propose to break debate and use a judge to obtain a final solution .
Outcome: The proposed framework encourages divergent thinking in large language models . it is able to generate novel thoughts even if initial stance is incorrect .
MaskCD: Mitigating LVLM Hallucinations by Image Head Masked Contrastive Decoding (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: LVLMs have shown remarkable performance in visual-language understanding for downstream multimodal tasks.
Approach: They propose a method to alleviate hallucinations by masking the “image heads” in LVLMs .
Outcome: The proposed method alleviates the phenomenon of hallucinations and retains the general capabilities of LVLMs.
Weight-Inherited Distillation for Task-Agnostic BERT Compression (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a predominant approach for BERT compression.
Approach: They propose a weight-inherited distillation method which directly transfers knowledge from the teacher to a compact student model by inheriting the weights.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art KD-based methods on GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks.
NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations.
Approach: They propose a task where a dialogue system can lead the conversation based on key topics of the news.
Outcome: The proposed method can lead conversations based on key topics of the news . it can also be used in information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios .
Specialist or Generalist? Instruction Tuning for Specific NLP Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that instruction tuning can be a data-efficient method for transforming large language models into generalist models, but their performance lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks.
Approach: They propose to incorporate broadcoverage generalist instruction tuning into large language models to build a specialist model by incorporating task specificity and skill requirements.
Outcome: The proposed method improves model performance when task coverage is broad and when training data is limited.
Addressing Entity Translation Problem via Translation Difficulty and Context Diversity (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation systems often produce inadequate translations for named entities.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation strategy to enhance the accuracy of named entity translation by retraining the target named entity pair.
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation accuracy across test sets and terminology tests.
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows .
Approach: They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code.
Outcome: The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation.
Fair Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) inherit issues from Graph Neural Networks such as fairness.
Approach: They propose to evolve LM-as-encoder to LM as-fair-encoding process to explore fairness in TAGRL.
Outcome: The proposed process can be integrated with fairness-enhancing strategies on the GNNs decoder side.
HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Generative AI has demonstrated unprecedented creativity in the field of computer vision, yet such phenomena have not been observed in the realm of literary creation.
Approach: They propose a framework for unleashing the creativity of large language models (LLMs) they assign LLMs to different roles involved in real-world scenario, they write .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in terms of coherence, relevance, interestingness and overall quality on automatically generated screenplays.

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