Papers by Zeng Zhao
VANE: Guiding High-Value Exploration in RLVR via Outcome-Process Novelty Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on large-scale mathematical reasoning and out-of-distribution tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantifies novelty across the outcome space and semantic process space by using reward or solution divergence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2.5-Math-7B demonstrate the proposed method is general and efficient. |
Prior Knowledge and Memory Enriched Transformer for Sign Language Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sign language translation do not explore all of them . visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning are challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates auxiliary information into vanilla transformer for SLT . they use visual-textual context information and additional auxiliary knowledge of a word . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the understanding of sign language videos with visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning. |
Extracting Relational Facts by an End-to-End Neural Model with Copy Mechanism (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on normal class and fail to extract relational triplets precisely. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model which can jointly extract relational triplets from sentences . they employ two different strategies in decoding process: employing only one united decoder or applying multiple separated decodeurs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline method significantly in two datasets. |
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyang Cai, Jiaming Zhang, Junjie Zhao, Ziyi Zeng, Yanchao Li, Liang Jingyi, Junying Chen, Yunjin Yang, Jiajun You, Shuzhi Deng, null Xieruiqiii, Yuanting Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Jianquan Li, Liangyi Chen, Junwen Wang, Shan Jiang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images. |
| Approach: | They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks. |
Adaptive Policy with Wait-k Model for Simultaneous Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous machine translation require a robust read/write policy . a standalone multi-path wait-k model performs competitively with adaptive policies . |
| Approach: | They propose a more flexible approach by decoupling the adaptive policy model from the translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline approaches in translation tasks. |
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. |
Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting multimedia fake news have demonstrated excellent results . however, addressing event-level inconsistency and learning from poor-quality news remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose an Event-diven fake news detection framework that integrates visual manipulation, textual emotion and multimodal inconsistency at event-level for fake news identification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs well on three large-scale fake news detection benchmarks. |
From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahao Tang, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Lijian Wu, Zijian Zhang, Yifei Tao, Dongxing Mao, Yang Wan, Jingru Tan, Min Zeng, Min Li, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Chart2Code is a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Approach: | They introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the first to scale task complexity while capturing diverse scenarios. |
TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Arushi Rai, Qiang Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Yunkai Zhang, Dipesh Tamboli, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, Lizhu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but typically require expensive post-training to reach high performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token-level Adaptive Routing to steer frozen LLMs toward structured reasoning entirely at inference time. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that TARo significantly improves reasoning performance by up to +22.4% over base model and +8.4% . |
Conditioned Masked Language and Image Modeling for Image-Text Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale two-stream pre-trained models like CLIP have achieved tremendous success in image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal framework for image-text retrieval using two-stream pre-trained models . they embed images and texts into instance representations with two separate encoders . experimental results on MSCOCO and Flickr30k reveal the effectiveness of their framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves image-text retrieval performance on two popular cross-modal retrieval benchmarks. |
Code-Switching Information Retrieval: Benchmarks, Analysis, and the Limits of Current Retrievers (2026.findings-acl)
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Qingcheng Zeng, Yuheng Lu, Zeqi Zhou, Heli Qi, Puxuan Yu, Fuheng Zhao, Hitomi Yanaka, Weihao Xuan, Naoto Yokoya
| Challenge: | a new study examines the performance of code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . code-witching is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in global communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . they propose CS-MTEB, which measures performance declines of up to 27% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that code-switching performance is degraded by 27% . the proposed benchmark is based on a dataset of mixed-language queries . |
Beyond Noise: Characterizing Creative Potential in Unverifiable LLM Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Yan, Chunhong Zhang, Haiyu Zhao, Ziyang Zeng, Zihao Liu, Yongkang Wu, Jianzhou Diao, YiJie Chen, Shujie Wang, Zheng Hu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models generate outputs that extend beyond established knowledge . prior work does not characterize the unverifiable space as a whole . |
| Approach: | They propose a novelty-verifiability characterization that distinguishes Creative Synthesis from Groundless Fabrication by a conceptual creation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distinguishes Creative Synthesis (Region A) from Groundless Fabrication (Regium B) it shows that Region A is non-negligible and robust, persisting across generation strategies, models, domains, and embedding choices. |
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%. |
Turning Failures into Value: Negative Experience Replay for RLVR via Confidence Gating and Boundary Failure Sampling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing experience replay methods for RLVR ignore sample inefficiency . expensive reasoning trajectories are discarded immediately after a single gradient update . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to replay failure trajectories to improve model refinement . they propose 'nexGRPO' which employs mid-confidence gating to filter invalid noise and saturated errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baaselines and achieves improved out-of-distribution generalization. |
CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Haibo Tong, Zeyang Yue, Feifei Zhao, Erliang Lin, Lu Jia, Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models. |
Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing controllable dialogue generation models focus on single attribute and lack generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional generalization model that learns from seen attributes and generalizes to unseen combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. |
DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.x. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.k. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan, Zhifang Sui, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures face challenges in ensuring expert specialization . despite the promising performance, scaling language models to an extremely large scale is associated with exceedingly high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for ultimate expert specialization by segmenting experts into mN ones and activating mK from them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable performance with GShard with 2B parameters and computation. |
ProductResearch: Training E-Commerce Deep Research Agents via Multi-Agent Synthetic Trajectory Distillation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents lack the interaction depth and contextual breadth required for complex product research. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that synthesizes high-fidelity tool-use trajectories for training robust e-commerce shopping agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-fidelity, long-horizon tool-use trajectories for training robust e-commerce shopping agents. |
MULFE: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Free Text Model Editing (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in comprehending human language and vast parametric knowledge obtained from large corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level benchmark for free text model editing to bridge the gap . they categorize probe queries into three levels of generalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization performance of large langugae models. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
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Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
LRQuant: Learnable and Robust Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for post-training quantization (PTQ) are limited by the complexity of the quantization parameter and performance degradations when tested on unseen datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a learnable smooth-based PTQ framework that allows for rapid adaptation during testing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on unseen datasets and reduces memory constraints. |
PsFuture: A Pseudo-Future-based Zero-Shot Adaptive Policy for Simultaneous Machine Translation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) requires target tokens to be generated in real-time as streaming source tokens are consumed. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot adaptive read/write policy for siMT that generates target tokens concurrently as streaming source tokens are consumed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed policy achieves performance on par with strong baselines and the P2F method can further enhance performance. |
Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals from a Language Model (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing weakly supervised text classification methods require a large number of annotated data and human annotations are expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to query a masked language model with cloze style prompts to obtain supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets by 2%, 4%, and 3%. |
RTADev: Intention Aligned Multi-Agent Framework for Software Development (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are efficient assistants to humans in software development tasks, but they can cause errors during the development process. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention aligned multi-agent framework that ensures that all agents work based on a consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces errors and improves the quality of generated software code. |
Hetero-Designer: Automated Design of Multi-Agent Systems with Heterogeneous LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to design LLM-based Multi-agent systems are constrained by homogeneous LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated design of heterogeneous-LLMs-based MAS with a binary-star transformer and an autoregressive graph generation pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline is high-performing on various benchmarks and extensible to unseen LLMs and roles. |
M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Bo Zeng, Liangying Shao, Yichen Dong, Xinwei Wu, Jiang Zhou, Tianyu Dong, Xiangxiang Zeng, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | prevailing methods for machine translation are often hindered by misleading reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns large language models to human preferences . they propose 'M2PO' to correct the bias towards partial errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models and achieves parity with proprietary models. |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
DIFFA-2: A Practical Diffusion Large Language Model for General Audio Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) large audio language models are expensive in data and computation . prior work shows diffusion-based LALMs can improve audio understanding under matched settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based LALM that upgrades the speech encoder and employs dual semantic and acoustic adapters. |
| Outcome: | a new model improves over existing autoregressive large language models and is competitive to strong AR models . the proposed model can make use of limited training data and improve inference efficiency . a recent study shows that diffusion-based models can improve audio understanding . |
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 . |
CLEEK: A Chinese Long-text Corpus for Entity Linking (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in natural language processing, says nigel kilgstrom . existing corpora for entity linking in china are lacking and deficient, he says . kilsmstrom: a new method for entity disambiguation can be developed for Chinese . |
| Approach: | They build a Chinese corpus of multi-domain long text for entity linking . they evaluate the difficulty of documents with respect to entity linking using a measure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on 100 documents from diverse domains and is publicly accessible. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
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Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation with Word-Level Domain Context Discrimination (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-French multi-domain translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use mixed-domain parallel sentences to construct a unified model that allows translation to switch between different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distinguishes and exploits word-level domain contexts on Chinese-English and English-French translation tasks. |
Distill The Image to Nowhere: Inversion Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multimodal machine translation (MMT) have focused on the fusion and alignment of images and texts to improve MMT. |
| Approach: | They propose an image-free inference framework that supports image-based inference via an inversion knowledge distillation scheme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first to rival or surpass image-must frameworks on the multimodal translation benchmark. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
CLEAR: Can Language Models Really Understand Causal Graphs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models lack a conceptual framework for understanding causal graphs, but there is still potential for improvement. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to define causal graph understanding by assessing language models’ behaviors through four practical criteria derived from diverse disciplines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines three complexity levels and encompasses 20 causal graph-based tasks across 20 different levels. |
Dynamic Personality in LLM Agents: A Framework for Evolutionary Modeling and Behavioral Analysis in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current models rely on static personality traits but lack natural selection processes and direct psychological metrics, failing to accurately capture authentic dynamic personality variations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses game payoffs as environmental feedback to drive adaptive personality evolution and analyze correlations between personality metrics and behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals new behavioral patterns of agents and evaluates personality-behavior relationships, advancing agent-based social simulations and human-AI symbiosis research. |
BMInf: An Efficient Toolkit for Big Model Inference and Tuning (2022.acl-demo)
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Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhengyan Zhang, Jie Zhou, Jun Zhang, Jia Chao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for big model inference and tuning which can support big model tuning at extremely low computation cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can support big model inference and tuning at extremely low computation cost. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that automatically discovers thinking token patterns with reasoning primitives and curates SFT datasets to prepare LLMs for RL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms baseline methods on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks on RL tasks. |
Review-Driven Multi-Label Music Style Classification by Exploiting Style Correlations (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Several methods have been proposed for automatic music style classification, but they are limited in two aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep learning approach to automatically learn and exploit style correlations by reviewing music reviews on websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs well in capturing style correlations. |
TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Industry Systems (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Yilun Kong, Jingqing Ruan, YiHong Chen, Bin Zhang, Tianpeng Bao, Shi Shiwei, Du Qing, Xiaoru Hu, Hangyu Mao, Ziyue Li, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao, Xueqian Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLMs in industrial systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLM-based agents in industrial systems. |
FaiMA: Feature-aware In-context Learning for Multi-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis are limited and integrating with existing techniques is difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes in-context learning as a feature-aware mechanism that facilitates adaptive learning in multi-domain ABSA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements in multiple domains compared to baselines, increasing F1 by 2.07% on average. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
Multi-Modal Entities Matter: Benchmarking Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MMEA datasets consider multi-modal data as attributes of textual entities, neglecting correlations between the multi-modal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal entity alignment dataset that models multi-dimensional data as textual entities in the MMKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can learn the structural information of entities by considering both intra-modal and cross-modal relations and infer the similarity of different types of entity pairs. |
LoRE: Enhancing Search Relevance with Progressive Chain-of-Thought and Preference Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenji Lu, Zhuo Chen, Hui Zhao, Zhiyuan Zeng, Gang Zhao, Junjie Ren, null Lihaoran, Songyan Liu, Pengjie Wang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | E-commerce search relevance is a critical component of retrieval systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-generative model for search relevance that trains reasoning knowledge, multi-modal understanding and rule awareness into three core competencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-5 in Macro-F1 and achieves 27% online gain. |
ChartEdit: How Far Are MLLMs From Automating Chart Analysis? Evaluating MLLMs’ Capability via Chart Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models rely on limited case studies . however, they lack the ability to generate accurate edits according to the instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for chart editing that includes 1,405 edit instructions applied to 233 real-world charts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 1,405 diverse editing instructions applied to 233 real-world charts. |
BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Baitao Gong, Yingfa Chen, Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Yanxu Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to compress medium-sized models for specific tasks have limited results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic compression toolkit for big models that implements quantization, pruning, distillation and MoEfication methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves performance on a model with 3 billion parameters by 12x . it also outperforms the original model on three typical NLP benchmarks. |
LexicalAT: Lexical-Based Adversarial Reinforcement Training for Robust Sentiment Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text classification models are fragile and sensitive to simple perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-classifier adversarial training approach to improve classification models . they use a large-scale lexical knowledge base to generate attacking examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and reduces test errors on neural networks. |
Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models with Ultra-Detailed Image Caption Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions are limited by the scarcity of image caption data. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions that integrates both pre-processing and post-processor stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves LVLMs' perception and cognitive abilities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. |
When to Continue Thinking: Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching for Efficient Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaoyun Zhang, Jingqing Ruan, Xing Ma, Yawen Zhu, Haodong Zhao, Hao Li, Jiansong Chen, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) incur excessive computational overhead due to redundant reasoning, especially on simple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Self-Recovery Reasoning framework that suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. |
Learning the Extraction Order of Multiple Relational Facts in a Sentence with Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing works didn’t consider the extraction order of relational facts in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the extraction order into consideration by applying reinforcement learning into a sequence-to-sequence model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could generate relational facts freely. |
Domain-Oriented Prefix-Tuning: Towards Efficient and Generalizable Fine-tuning for Zero-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for domain adaptation of abstractive dialogue summarization lack generalization ability on new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-oriented prefix-tuning model that uses a prefix module to alleviate domain entanglement and discrete prompts to guide the model to focus on key contents of dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be generalized to two multi-domain dialogue summarization datasets. |
Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Lida He, Qi Zhou, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Yi Wang, Wei Li, Qingyu Wang, Jiatao Li, Wei Gong, Jialei Zeng, Jingmei Zhao, Ke Jiang, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold. |
SeDev: Structured Semantic Exploration for LLM-Driven Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in automating code generation, but they suffer from insufficient exploration of the vast solution space. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale LLM-driven code generation framework that efficiently finds high-quality solutions in only a few iterations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while maintaining reasonable time and computational costs. |
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. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
DeepSieve: Information Sieving via LLM-as-a-Knowledge-Router (2026.findings-eacl)
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Minghao Guo, Qingcheng Zeng, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wenchao Yu, Mengnan Du, Haifeng Chen, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over query and source sides, resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic RAG framework that integrates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional approaches. |
Revisit Overconfidence for OOD Detection: Reassigned Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Class-dependent Threshold (2022.naacl-main)
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Yanan Wu, Keqing He, Yuanmeng Yan, QiXiang Gao, Zhiyuan Zeng, Fujia Zheng, Lulu Zhao, Huixing Jiang, Wei Wu, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for OOD detection are based on labeled in-domain data . detecting out-of-domain (OOD) or unknown intents is challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning method to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective for both aspects of overconfidence issues. |
DrFrattn: Directly Learn Adaptive Policy from Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn read/write policies from attention mechanism may compromise effectiveness of attention mechanism . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly learns adaptive policies from the attention mechanism . experimental results demonstrate that the method achieves an improved balance between translation accuracy and latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves improved balance between translation accuracy and latency. |
Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods implicitly model time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-based temporal programming method that leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models to understand combinatory time constraints in questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and CronQuestions datasets and is highly efficient on multi-level questions. |
Give the Truth: Incorporate Semantic Slot into Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive dialogue summarization suffers from a lot of factual errors due to scattered salient elements in multi-speaker information interaction process. |
| Approach: | They propose a slot-driven beam search algorithm to give priority to generating salient elements in a limited length by "filling-in-the-blanks". |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves the slot-driven beam search algorithm on different types of factual errors and human evaluation further verifies the results. |
Improving the Robustness of Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Uncertainty-Aware Teacher Learning and Student-Student Collaborative Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods require a substantial quantity of high-quality annotation for training models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce the number of incorrect pseudo labels in self-training . they propose 'uncertainty-aware teacher learning' and 'student-student collaboration' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art DS-NER denoising methods. |
Automatic Instruction Evolving for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Evol-Instruct is an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets without human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets without human effort by analyzing and analyzing evolutionary strategies for the given instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms human-designed methods on various benchmarks including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, and HumanEval. |
Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, Qinyu Chen, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Kezhao Huang, Xingkai Yu, Zhewen Hao, Han Zhang, Yu-Kun Li, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but lacks knowledge lookup primitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional memory instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE) they propose 'u-shaped scaling law' that identifies optimal balance between MoE experts and DSE memory . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms an iso-parameter and isoFLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks and is infrastructure-efficient. |
HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Ru Peng, Tianyu Zhao, Xijun Gu, Zhiting Fan, Haokai Xu, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Yihong Zhuang, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. |
| Approach: | They define the first HSS domain system covering 14 mainstream fields and introduce HSS-Synth. |
| Outcome: | the proposed pipeline outperforms 14 leading baselines on 16 benchmarks. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
FlowMalTrans: Unsupervised Binary Code Translation for Malware Detection Using Flow-Adapter Architecture (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using deep learning to detect malware has attracted great attention due to its notable performance. |
| Approach: | a new approach uses Neural Machine Translation and Normalizing Flows to apply deep learning to malware detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the burden of data collection by enabling malware detection across multiple ISAs. |
MoSLD: An Extremely Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Shared LoRAs for Multi-Task Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | LoRA is a key technique for fine-tuning large pre-trained models, yet its performance in multi-task learning scenarios often falls short. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-shared-LoRAs model with a dropout strategy . they propose to share the upper projection matrix among different experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits excellent performance in both single-task and multi-task scenarios with robust out-of-domain generalization capabilities. |
Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
Easy and Efficient Transformer: Scalable Inference Solution For Large NLP Model (2022.naacl-industry)
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Gongzheng Li, Yadong Xi, Jingzhen Ding, Duan Wang, Ziyang Luo, Rongsheng Zhang, Bai Liu, Changjie Fan, Xiaoxi Mao, Zeng Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that transformer-based models are effective over many tasks, but they are expensive to deploy in the industrial application. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based inference solution that optimizes kernels for long inputs and large hidden sizes and a flexible CUDA memory manager to reduce the memory footprint when deploying a large model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves an average speedup of 1.40-4.20x on the transformer decoder layer with an A100 GPU. |
Task Compass: Scaling Multi-task Pre-training with Task Prefix (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuosheng Zhang, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Yang Liu, Hai Zhao, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task prefix guided multi-task pre-training framework to explore the relationships among tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as a foundation backbone for a wide range of tasks and as augmentation tool for data augmentation with complementary tasks. |
LANTERN in the Event Stream: Training-Free Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting by Balancing Inertia and Shifts (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graph forecasting (TKGF) uses long-window strengthscores and short-windowed novelty scores to predict missing entities in future queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-freeprompting framework that uses two perspectives of history to predict missing entities in future queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselineAnRe framework in ICEWS14, ICEW05-15, and GDELT. |
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. |
MetaBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Metabolomics (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxing Lu, Xukai Zhao, J. Ben Tamo, Micky C. Nnamdi, Rui Peng, Shuang Zeng, Xingyu Hu, Jinzhuo Wang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on general text, but their proficiency in specialized scientific domains remains uncharacterized. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the capabilities of large language models in metabolomics research using MetaBench . they found that models perform well on text generation tasks, but cross-database identifier grounding remains challenging . |
| Outcome: | The evaluation of 25 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals distinct performance patterns across metabolomics tasks. |
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)
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Yadong Xi, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lei Lin, Yanjiang Chen, Shuhan Yang, Xuhan Chen, Kailun Tao, Zhi Li, Gongzheng Li, Lin Jiang, Siyan Liu, Zeng Zhao, Minlie Huang, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |
Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration (2025.naacl-long)
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Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao, Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Hui Wang, Xi Zeng, Xingwei Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |
Mitigating Training Imbalance in LLM Fine-Tuning via Selective Parameter Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that the order of training samples can affect model performance, but this is not the case. |
| Approach: | They propose to merge supervised fine-tuning models with different data orders to mitigate this imbalance by parameter merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the weighted-average method on five datasets. |