Papers by Zhao Zhang
Probing the Geometry of Truth: Consistency and Generalization of Truth Directions in LLMs Across Logical Transformations and Question Answering Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast corpora that contain substantial knowledge but their outputs often contain confidently stated inaccuracies. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode truthfulness as a distinct linear feature, termed the "truth direction", which can classify truthfulness reliably. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to logical transformations, question-answering tasks, in-context learning, and external knowledge sources. |
NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding (2024.eacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for interactive agents focus on specific capabilities in predetermined scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives in an immersive environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates human-like responses guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. |
Many-to-English Machine Translation Tools, Data, and Pretrained Models (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer . commercial translation systems do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual neural machine translation model that can translate from 500 source languages to English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate from 500 source languages to English, or be used as a parent model for low-resource languages. |
How LLMs React to Industrial Spatio-Temporal Data? Assessing Hallucination with a Novel Traffic Incident Benchmark Dataset (2025.naacl-industry)
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Qiang Li, Mingkun Tan, Xun Zhao, Dan Zhang, Daoan Zhang, Shengzhao Lei, Anderson S. Chu, Lujun Li, Porawit Kamnoedboon
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a high potential to digitize and enhance the health & public services industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cross-lingual benchmark dataset to assess the robustness of state-of-the-art LLMs in the spatio vs temporal domain for traffic incident classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in the spatio-temporal domain and in the non-English context. |
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. |
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
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. |
Data Manipulation: Towards Effective Instance Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation via Learning to Augment and Reweight (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue models learn from human conversations . however, due to the open-ended nature of human conversations, the quality of training data varies . |
| Approach: | They propose a data manipulation framework to augment and highlight effective training samples . they also propose to increase its manipulation skills through gradient descent with validation samples a reshaping framework to proactively restructure the data distribution towards reliable samples is also proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of open-domain neural dialogue models with respect to evaluation metrics and human judgments. |
Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance . we propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages to select silver labels for cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two cross-lingual tasks by 10 F1 on average and 2.5 accuracy on natural language inference (NLI). |
Thread: A Logic-Based Data Organization Paradigm for How-To Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaikai An, Fangkai Yang, Liqun Li, Junting Lu, Sitao Cheng, Shuzheng Si, Lu Wang, Pu Zhao, Lele Cao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have substantially improved question-answering systems, particularly for factoid ‘5Ws’ questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a data organization paradigm where large language models transform documents into more structured and loosely interconnected LUs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in open-domain and industrial settings show that the proposed paradigm outperforms existing paradigms and shows high adaptability across diverse document formats. |
SP3: Enhancing Structured Pruning via PCA Projection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning is a widely used technique for reducing the size of pre-trained language models, but current methods overlook the potential of compressing the hidden dimension d in PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach that projectes features into a space defined by principal components before masking the hidden dimension d in pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmarks show that SP3 can reduce d by 70%, compress 94% of the BERTbase model, and maintain over 96% accuracy. |
Back to the Future: Bidirectional Information Decoupling Network for Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue modeling use pre-trained language models to encode dialogue history as successive tokens, which is insufficient in capturing the temporal characteristics of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional information decoupling network as a universal dialogue encoder which explicitly incorporates both the past and future contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates past and future contexts and can be generalized to a wide range of dialogue-related tasks. |
Dual Prompt Tuning based Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on hierarchy-aware text feature by exploiting explicit parent-child relationships, resulting in label confusion within each layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-prompt tuning method which emphasizes discrimination among peer labels by performing contrastive learning on each hierarchical layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haoyu Dong, Jianbo Zhao, Yuzhang Tian, Junyu Xiong, Mengyu Zhou, Yun Lin, José Cambronero, Yeye He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Spreadsheets are characterized by their extensive two-dimensional grids, flexible layouts, and varied formatting options, which pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a structural-anchor-based compression, inverse index translation, and data-format-aware aggregation module to compress spreadsheets effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing model in GPT4 and achieves a state-of-the-art 78.9% F1 score. |
The Design and Construction of a Chinese Sarcasm Dataset (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sarcasm datasets are limited to English and Chinese . sarcasm is a multi-layered semi-conscious language phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a high-quality Chinese sarcasm dataset using user comments . they use manual annotated sarkastic texts and non-sarcastic texts to train sarcasm classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 2,486 manual annotated sarcastic texts and 89,296 non-sarcatic texts. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Shuyue Guo, Linzheng Chai, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. |
| Approach: | They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models. |
MSEarth: A Multimodal Benchmark for Earth Science Phenomenon Discovery with MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
MTA:A Merge-then-Adapt Framework for Personalized Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaopeng Li, Yuanjin Zheng, Wanyu Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Haiying He, Mengyang Ma, Yiqi Wang, Maolin Wang, Xuetao Wei, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align outputs with individual user preferences . current methods of fine-tuning a separate module for each user are unscalable . |
| Approach: | They propose a Merge-then-Adapt framework for Personalized Large Language Models . they construct a shared Meta-LoRA bank and propose an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing SOTA methods on the LaMP benchmark. |
Dialog-Post: Multi-Level Self-Supervised Objectives and Hierarchical Model for Dialogue Post-Training (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new method for dialogue representation and understanding is proposed . pre-trained language models (PLMs) are inappropriate for dialogue understanding tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains pre-trained language models to fit dialogues . they use a hierarchical segment-wise self-attention network to model dialogues more comprehensively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and achieves a 3.3% improvement on average. |
RE-Matching: A Fine-Grained Semantic Matching Method for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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Jun Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Xin Zhao, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Junzhe Wang, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot relation extraction lack explicit modeling of matching pattern . et al. (2018) show that our method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction . they decompose sentence-level similarity score into entity matching score and context matching score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed than state-of-the-art methods. |
LLM-based Translation Inference with Iterative Bilingual Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the ability of large language models to generate contextual understanding of the sentence can degrade translation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates contextual understanding for both source and target languages separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong comparison methods in multiple domains. |
The Illusion of Randomness: How LLMs Fail to Emulate Stochastic Decision-Making in Rock-Paper-Scissors Games? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior research indicates that large language models articulate the theoretical probability distributions associated with optimal strategic choices, but their actual decision-making diverges from these prescriptions. |
| Approach: | a systematic evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals a cognitive bias gap . intrinsic biases inherited from pre-training corpora alone are insufficient to explain deviations . a semantic-free paradigm strips away intrinsic bias to isolate pure positional bias . |
| Outcome: | a systematic evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art LLMs shows that intrinsic biases are insufficient to explain deviations. |
The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Role of Neutral Words in Language Model Group-Agnostic Debiasing (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Junlei Zhou, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, raising ethical concerns, especially about perpetuating stereotypes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates a neutral word semantics-based loss function to alleviate the deterioration of the LMS during debiasing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the deterioration of the Language Modeling Score (LMS) by incorporating a neutral word semantics-based loss function. |
Label Anchored Contrastive Learning for Language Understanding (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach to contrastive learning for language understanding is not fully explored . contrastive training has been widely applied to self-supervised representation learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a label anchored contrastive learning approach for language understanding using a class label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on GLUE and CLUE benchmarks by 4.1% compared to the state-of-the-art approaches . the proposed approach also improves under the few-shot and data imbalance settings . |
Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Zero-shot Can Be Stronger than Few-shot (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They introduce CoT to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability . however, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplar is still beneficial for recent, stronger models in such tasks. |
| Outcome: | The enhanced exemplars fail to improve the model’s reasoning performance, despite being constructed using answers from advanced models such as Qwen2.5-Max and DeepSeek-R1. |
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Towards Effective and Lightweight Clean-Label Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based learning paradigms are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, requiring false activations and false data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses triggers to create stronger shortcuts by leveraging activation values and data selection strategies to create the shortcuts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the concept that a backdoor acts as a shortcut and can achieve high effectiveness and stealthiness at low poisoning rates. |
Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the role of immersion and agency in interactive drama. |
| Approach: | They propose a playwriting-guided generation method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves storytelling quality and immersion and agency, while allowing agents to refine their reactions to align with the player’s intentions. |
Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual few-shot event detection use labeled data, but in real-world applications, new event types emerge continually. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-based framework for continual few-shot event detection . they incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set to memorize previous event types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks. |
From Alignment to Entailment: A Unified Textual Entailment Framework for Entity Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode the triples of entities as embeddings and learn to align the embeddables, which prevents the direct interaction between the original information of the cross-KG entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform the triples into unified textual sequences and model the EA task as a bi-directional textual entailment task between the sequences of cross-KG entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five cross-lingual datasets and allows the mutual enhancement of the heterogeneous information. |
Cross Copy Network for Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of sequence-to-sequence models, dialogue logics are often ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a network architecture to explore the current dialog context and similar dialogue instances’ logical structure simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network architecture is superior to existing state-of-the-art models. |
LLMEmbed: Rethinking Lightweight LLM’s Genuine Function in Text Classification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent attempts to improve text classification performance are based on heuristic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) LLMEmbed is a simple and effective transfer learning strategy that can be used to improve the performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple transfer learning strategy to improve text classification using heuristic Chain-of-Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong performance on publicly available datasets while using low training overhead. |
A Frame-based Sentence Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine learning approaches do not have above semantic knowledge to address complicated MRC questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a frame-based Sentence Representation method which integrates frame semantic knowledge to facilitate sentence modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on machine reading comprehension task. |
EVA: Evolving Semantic Adversaries for Red-Teaming GUI Agents Against Environmental Injection Attacks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yijie Lu, Manman Zhao, Tianjie Ju, Zihe Yan, Xinbei Ma, Yuan Guo, Daizong Ding, Gongshen Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for red-teaming face a trade-off between requiring target-specific knowledge and incurring prohibitive computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evolves payloads exclusively on the semantic dimension via a discovery-deployment pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EVA outperforms baselines in terms of attack success rate while evolving benign seeds into successful attacks within 1.18 to 1.71 iterations. |
Addressing Troublesome Words in Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has weaknesses in handling lowfrequency and ambiguous words, which we refer to as troublesome words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual memory to memorize which target words should be produced in which situations to translate troublesome words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on Chinese-to-English and English-to German translation tasks. |
CroAno : A Crowd Annotation Platform for Improving Label Consistency of Chinese NER Dataset (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Baoli Zhang, Zhucong Li, Zhen Gan, Yubo Chen, Jing Wan, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Shengping Liu, Yafei Shi
| Challenge: | Existing crowd annotation tools for named entity recognition (NER) focus on efficiency and don't consider consistency of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a crowd annotation platform for Chinese named entity recognition (NER) CroAno provides a systematic solution for improving label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform improves label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
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Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
MenatQA: A New Dataset for Testing the Temporal Comprehension and Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown nearly saturated performance on many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct multiple sensitive factors time QA which encompasses three temporal factors . they test current mainstream LLMs with different parameter sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates three temporal factors with 2,853 samples . the results show that LLMs fall behind smaller models on these factors . |
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
G-LoRA: Global-Local Decoupled Low-Rank Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves the fine-tuning efficiency and performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptive approach that decomposes update matrix into global and local adapters and assigns them to local and global adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 2.7% accuracy improvement over LoRA and its variants on commonsense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. |
Cross-Lingual Question Answering over Knowledge Base as Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing high-quality xMRC datasets can be further utilized to fine-tune our model. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual question answering over knowledge base approach that converts KB subgraphs into passages to narrow the gap between KB schemas and questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and achieves strong few-shot and zero-shot performance on two xKBQA datasets in 12 languages. |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
HalluAudio: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucination focus on text or vision, while few audio-oriented studies are limited in scale, modality coverage, and diagnostic depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for evaluating hallucinations across speech, sound, and music. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves hallucination rate, yes/no bias, error-type analysis, and refusal rate. |
The Impact of Reasoning Step Length on Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long reasoning steps in LLMs improve reasoning abilities, but the correlation between their effectiveness and the length of reasoning steps remains largely unknown. |
| Approach: | They conducted experiments that expand and compress the rationale reasoning steps within CoT demonstrations while keeping all other factors constant. |
| Outcome: | The results show that lengthening the reasoning steps in prompts significantly enhances LLMs’ reasoning abilities across multiple datasets. |
Self-Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Open-Domain QA (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) aims to answer questions without explicitly providing specific background documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explicitly utilize the massive knowledge encoded in LLM parameters and their strong instruction understanding abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on three widely-used ODQA datasets and achieves comparable performance with customized fine-tuned models on full training data. |
A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leapt from static chatbots to versatile agents that tackle complex tasks such as science experiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-execute framework and propose 'EAGLET' to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three long-horizon tasks and reduces training costs by 8 compared to baselines. |
Towards Comprehensive Argument Analysis in Education: Dataset, Tasks, and Method (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on argument mining has proposed various argument annotation schemes and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework comprising 14 fine-grained relation types to capture the interplay between argument components for a thorough understanding of argument structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the interplay between argument components for a thorough understanding of argument structure. |
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. |
BANER: Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims to detect the entity spans of text and classify them into pre-defined set of entity types. |
| Approach: | They propose a boundary-aware contrastive learning strategy to enhance the LLM’s ability to perceive entity boundaries for generalized entity spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods and validates its effectiveness across a range of LLM architectures. |
Structural Characterization for Dialogue Disentanglement (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | tangled multi-party dialogues lead to difficulties in understanding the dialogue history for both human and machine. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for disentangling multi-party dialogues using speaker property and reference dependency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu IRC benchmark dataset and contributes to dialogue-related comprehension. |
Rethinking Sample Polarity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) positive and negative self-generated rollouts are used to update the model's policy . positive samples sharpen existing correct reasoning patterns, while negative samples encourage exploration of new reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates advantage signals to key tokens across different polarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the ability of large reasoning models to learn from their own generated rollouts. |
Beyond Literal Descriptions: Understanding and Locating Open-World Objects Aligned with Human Intentions (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual grounding rely on the assumption that the given expression must be literal . this impedes the practical deployment of agents in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual grounding task that uses intention expressions to locate foreground entities . they build a large-scale IVG dataset with free-form intention expression to promote VG . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a large-scale intention-driven visual-language (V-L) dataset with free-form intention expressions. |
Deep Kernel Fusion for Transformers (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Agentic LLM inference with long contexts is limited by memory bandwidth rather than compute. |
| Approach: | They propose a deeply fused kernel that cuts HBM traffic and boosts cache reuse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed kernel delivers 13.2% speedup on H100 and 9.7% on A100 over SGLang. |
Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jiayu Lin, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work describes paragraph-level counter-argument generation task as paragraph-based . however, sentence-level generation can be quite different due to its unique constraints and brevity-focused challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework for sentence-level counter-argument generation . they use an annotated debate forum dataset to generate high-quality counter-argments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and evaluator are competitive in counter-argument generation tasks. |
GeoLaux: A Benchmark for Evaluating MLLMs’ Geometry Performance on Long-Step Problems Requiring Auxiliary Lines (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Geometry problem solving lack fine-grained evaluation for long-step problems necessitating auxiliary line construction. |
| Approach: | They present a fine-grained annotated dataset with long-step reasoning and auxiliary line construction that provides a detailed evaluation of 23 leading MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly worse on long-step problems than short-step ones, with 18 models showing a performance drop of over 50%. |
hyperdoc2vec: Distributed Representations of Hypertext Documents (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Conventional text embedding methods suffer from information loss if directly adapted to hyper-documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an embedding approach for hyper-documents that incorporates four criteria to preserve necessary information for embeddable models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several existing models on two tasks in the academic domain. |
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency of multi-agent systems rely on aggressive graph topology evolution . however, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution that manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling. |
PVPO: Pre-Estimated Value-Based Policy Optimization for Agentic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | extending grouping-based methods to agentic reasoning presents unique challenges . frequent environment interactions and tool invocations render intra-group advantage estimation unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a grouping-based method that uses a single round of rollouts to stabilize advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | a new RL framework outperforms grouping-based methods in retrieval tasks and advanced mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Commonsense Subgraph for Inductive Relation Reasoning with Meta-learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing subgraph-based models focus on predicting missing relations in knowledge graphs . a new meta-learning model extracts concepts from entities to construct commonsense subgraphs based on semantic information . |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense subgraph meta-learning model that extracts concepts from entities to construct commonsensible subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in inductive reasoning tasks and in few-shot scenarios. |
End-to-End Modeling via Information Tree for One-Shot Natural Language Spatial Video Grounding (2022.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Haoyu Zhang, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Wenming Tan, Jin Wang, Peng Wang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for grounding video frames with dense annotations require enormous amount of human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground natural language in video frames with only one frame labeled . they propose an end-to-end model that eliminates interference of irrelevant frames . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can ground natural language in all video frames with only one frame labeled . the proposed model eliminates interference of irrelevant frames based on branch search and cropping techniques . |
SPHERE: Unveiling Spatial Blind Spots in Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Wenyu Zhang, Wei En Ng, Lixin Ma, Yuwen Wang, Junqi Zhao, Allison Koenecke, Boyang Li, Wanglu Wanglu
| Challenge: | Current vision-language models lack multi-dimensional spatial reasoning capabilities for human-like understanding and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical evaluation framework that probes models across increasing levels of complexity and integrates spatial, visual, and logical understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework probes models across increasing levels of complexity, from basic skills to multi-skill integration and high-level reasoning that combines spatial, visual, and logical understanding. |
Topic-relevant Response Generation using Optimal Transport for an Open-domain Dialog System (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional neural generative models generate safe and generic responses which have little connection with previous utterances semantically and would disengage users in a dialog system. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that employs topical constraint and semantic constraint to generate relevant responses by regularizing the decoding objective function with semantic distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more topic-relevant and content-rich responses than conventional models. |
GMSA: Enhancing Context Compression via Group Merging and Layer Semantic Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Jiwei Tang, Zhicheng Zhang, Shunlong Wu, Jingheng Ye, Lichen Bai, Zitai Wang, Tingwei Lu, Lin Hai, Yiming Zhao, Hai-Tao Zheng, Hong-Gee Kim
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across NLP tasks . however, in long-context scenarios, they face high computational cost and information redundancy. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder context compression framework that generates a compact sequence of soft tokens for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that GMSA outperforms baselines on multiple long-context question answering and summarization benchmarks while maintaining low end-to-end latency. |
SimulSpeech: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech to Text Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | SimulSpeech is an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system . conventional approaches to simultaneous speech translation divide the translation process into two stages . |
| Approach: | They develop an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system which translates speech in source language to text in target language concurrently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves reasonable BLEU scores and lower delay compared to full-sentence translation model. |
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% . |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
ReportLogic: Evaluating Logical Quality in Deep Research Reports (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks that evaluate large language models for Deep Research largely ignore this requirement. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that quantifies report-level logical quality through a reader-centric lens of auditability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model quantifies logical quality through a reader-centric lens of auditability. |
RaTEScore: A Metric for Radiology Report Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics to evaluate the quality of medical reports are limited due to the complexity of clinical free-form texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to assess the quality of medical reports generated by AI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is based on a medical NER dataset and trained on NER models . it aligns more closely with human preference than existing metrics, the authors show . |
Dialogue Graph Modeling for Conversational Machine Reading (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational machine reading (CMR) are not effective for capturing multiple objects in complex interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue graph modeling framework that captures explicit and implicit interactions hidden in the rule documents and a model that asks clarification questions to the machine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exceeds the milestone accuracy score of 80% on the ShARC benchmark and achieves new state-of-the-art by first exceeding the milestone precision score of 90%. |
SHIFT: Selected Helpful Informative Frame for Video-guided Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Video-guided machine translation (VMT) aims to improve translation quality by integrating contextual information from paired short video clips. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for video-guided machine translation with multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of MLLMs while reducing computational cost. |
Enhancing Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning with Simple Calibration Based on Stable Rank (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for lightweight fine-tuning are ineffective in low-resource settings but fail in high-resourced settings, leading to unreliable outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration strategy that takes into account the inherent variance of generalization ability in model components and potential changes during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration improves GLUE score by 3.1 points over the previous calibration method. |
Capturing Relations between Scientific Papers: An Abstractive Model for Related Work Section Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing related work generation models are inflexible and extract sentences from multiple papers to form a related work discussion. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-aware Related work generator which generates an abstractive related work from the given multiple scientific papers in the same research area. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing models and can be used to familiarize researchers with the state of the art in the field. |
Towards Advanced Mathematical Reasoning for LLMs via First-Order Logic Theorem Proving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chuxue Cao, Mengze Li, Juntao Dai, Jinluan Yang, Zijian Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Weijie Shi, Chengzhong Liu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising first-order logic (FOL) reasoning capabilities with applications in various areas, but their effectiveness in complex mathematical reasoning involving multi-step FOL deductions remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-adaptive solution that enhances the Diversity and REAsonability of LLMs’ generation strategies by introducing an Axiom-Driven Strategy Diversification mechanism and a Sub-Proposition Error Feedback to help LLM reflect on and correct their proofs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves diversity and REAsonability of LLMs’ generation strategies by introducing an Axiom-Driven Strategy Diversification mechanism and a Sub-Proposition Error Feedback to help LLM reflect on and correct proofs. |
Relation-Aware Question Answering for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based approaches to solve multihop Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) fail to utilize information from head-tail entities and the semantic connection between relations to enhance the information capturing of relations in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dual relation graph to find the answer entity in a knowledge graph . they use primal entity graph reasoning, dual relation grafitment and interaction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance gain over the prior state-of-the-art on two public datasets, WebQSP and CWQ. |
E-NER: Evidential Deep Learning for Trustworthy Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhen Zhang, Mengting Hu, Shiwan Zhao, Minlie Huang, Haotian Wang, Lemao Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Zhe Liu, Bingzhe Wu
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) systems focus on improving model performance, ignoring the need to quantify model uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce two uncertainty-guided loss terms to the conventional EDL and a series of uncertainty-guiding training strategies to solve these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better OOV/OOD detection performance and generalization ability on OOV entities compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Modeling Hierarchical Reasoning Chains by Linking Discourse Units and Key Phrases for Reading Comprehension (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of logical reasoning focus on entity-aware information but ignore hierarchical relations that may even have mutual effects. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic graph network that deals with context at both discourse-level and word-level as the basis for logical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on logical reasoning QA datasets and natural language inference datasets. |
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)
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Jia Li, Ge Li, Yunfei Zhao, Yongmin Li, Huanyu Liu, Hao Zhu, Lecheng Wang, Kaibo Liu, Zheng Fang, Lanshen Wang, Jiazheng Ding, Xuanming Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Gu, Mengfei Yang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level benchmark named DevEval to evaluate LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the LLMs perform better in real-world code repositories than existing benchmarks. |
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. |
TriFine: A Large-Scale Dataset of Vision-Audio-Subtitle for Tri-Modal Machine Translation and Benchmark with Fine-Grained Annotated Tags (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing video-guided machine translation approaches use coarse-grained visual information, resulting in information redundancy and high computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained approach to video-guided machine translation using visual information . they use a large-scale dataset with annotated multimodal fine-grain tags . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance with lower computational overhead compared to coarse-grained methods and text-only models. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
Unleashing the Power of Language Models in Text-Attributed Graph (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on graph learning on text-attributed graphs have been limited by memory cost and underutilization of relationships between nodes and words. |
| Approach: | They propose a Node Representation Update Pre-training Architecture based on Co-modeling text and graph to learn representations of papers and words simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the ogbn-arxiv benchmark dataset. |
Test-Time Strategies for More Efficient and Accurate Agentic RAG (2026.acl-srw)
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Abhinav Sharma, Brian Zhang, Deepti Guntur, Zhiyang Zuo, Shreyas Chaudhari, Wenlong Zhao, Franck Dernoncourt, Puneet Mathur, Ryan A. Rossi, Nedim Lipka
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face challenges with complex, multi-hop questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate contextualization module and de-duplication module to improve the accuracy of retrieved documents and to reduce the number of turns by 10.5%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a 5.6% increase in EM score and reduces the average number of turns by 10.5% compared to the baseline. |
RACER: Retrieval-Augmented Contextual Rapid Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding large language models generate one token per step, causing high inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates retrieved exact patterns with logit-driven future cues. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Spec-Bench, HumanEval, and MGSM-ZH show that RACER outperforms training-free methods and accelerates inference. |
Skeleton-Guided-Translation: A Benchmarking Framework for Code Repository Translation with Fine-Grained Quality Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xing Zhang, Jiaheng Wen, Fangkai Yang, Yu Kang, Pu Zhao, Junhao Wang, Maoquan Wang, Yufan Huang, Shengyu Fu, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Yingnong Dang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code translation benchmarks focus on individual functions, overlooking repository-level challenges like intermodule coherence and dependency management. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for benchmarking Java-to-C# translation at the repository level . it uses a translation framework guided by skeletons and fine-grained quality evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Java-to-C# translation quality at the repository level. |
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for sequence labeling are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback . they identify context and feedback biases by formulating interactive sequence labels via a Structural Causal Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can effectively alleviate the biases and can be learnt with the user feedback. |
A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating the Safeguards in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuxia Wang, Zenan Zhai, Haonan Li, Xudong Han, Shom Lin, Zhenxuan Zhang, Angela Zhao, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin
| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that large language models can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs in Mandarin Chinese . they extend the dataset to better identify false negative and false positive examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs, and is based on a Chinese dataset. |
LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN (2026.findings-acl)
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Sijie Wang, Kai Zhao, Wee Peng Tay, Shuo Zhang, Chengwen Liu, Quanjiang Guo, Ren Junhao, Xin Li, Heng Lian, Jingdi Lei, Rui She, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. |
CAN: Constrained Attention Networks for Multi-Aspect Sentiment Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect-specific sentiment classification are noisy and downgraded performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a constrained attention network to regularize attention for multi-aspect sentiment analysis by orthogonal regularization on multiple aspects and sparse regularization for each single aspect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets and extends to multi-task settings. |
Make-A-Voice: Revisiting Voice Large Language Models as Scalable Multilingual and Multitask Learners (2024.acl-long)
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Rongjie Huang, Chunlei Zhang, Yongqi Wang, Dongchao Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Zhenhui Ye, Luping Liu, Zehan Wang, Ziyue Jiang, Xuankai Chang, Jiatong Shi, Chao Weng, Zhou Zhao, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for general-purpose interfaces across multiple tasks and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as a general-purpose interface across multiple tasks and languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on 200K hours of 6-language data for voice generation applications. |
Are Intermediate Layers and Labels Really Necessary? A General Language Model Distillation Method (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods rely on intermediate layer features and golden labels, which require aligned model architecture and labeled data respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a general language model distillation method that performs two-stage word prediction distillation and vocabulary compression, which is simple and shows extremely strong performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 25 state-of-the-art methods on the SuperGLUE benchmark, achieving an average score that surpasses the best method by 3%. |
CriticSearch: Fine-Grained Credit Assignment for Search Agents via a Retrospective Critic (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing search agent pipelines rely on sparse outcome rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and unstable training. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-integrated reasoning framework that provides turn-level feedback via a retrospective critic mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in multi-hop reasoning benchmarks and achieves faster convergence and training stability. |
Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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Yiqun Hu, Yiyun Zhao, Jiarong Jiang, Wuwei Lan, Henghui Zhu, Anuj Chauhan, Alexander Hanbo Li, Lin Pan, Jun Wang, Chung-Wei Hang, Sheng Zhang, Jiang Guo, Mingwen Dong, Joseph Lilien, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers lack the data to perform well with augmented synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that imposes strong typing constraints and incorporates key relationships from schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the high-quality synthesized SQL and natural language question (NLQ) models have significant accuracy boosts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on spider. |
Forging Multiple Training Objectives for Pre-trained Language Models via Meta-Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that learning multiple training objectives in a single model makes the learned language representation barely converge to the desired optimum. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning-based adaptive sampler which learns latent sampling pattern on arbitrary pre-training objectives. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that learning multiple objectives in a single model makes it difficult to achieve the desired optimum. |
English as Defense Proxy: Mitigating Multilingual Jailbreak via Eliciting English Safety Knowledge (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in many tasks, but their safety guarantees vary by language. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified approach that leverages English as a universal safety anchor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach leverages English as defense proxy (E-Proxy) to transfer safety knowledge across languages. |
CMQA: A Dataset of Conditional Question Answering with Multiple-Span Answers (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets only contain unconditional and parallel answers . conditional question answering with hierarchical multi-span answers is challenging for the community to solve . |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional question answering task with hierarchical multi-span answers . they propose CMQA, which contains conditional and hierarchic samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to build more reliable and sophisticated QA systems. |
Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion from Hierarchical Perspective (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require only a few associative triples to complete a relationship. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform data augmentation from two perspectives to solve the FKGC problem by inferring new triple facts from existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a number of existing models. |
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. |
A Survey of Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Progress and Challenges (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method framework provides a detailed analysis of the current landscape and its trade-offs and practical applications. |
GeoArena: Evaluating Open-World Geographic Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation paradigms for geographic reasoning are outcome-centric and focus on label matching, leaving the underlying linguistic reasoning chains as unexamined black boxes. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic, human-preference-based evaluation framework for benchmarking open-world geographic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reframes evaluation as a pairwise reasoning alignment task on in-the-wild images, where human judges compare model-generated explanations based on reasoning quality, evidence synthesis, and plausibility. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning Through Trap Problems (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current LLMs lack systematic compositionality, and therefore cannot serve as reliable cognitive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce logical traps into the original problems of MATH and GSM8K to investigate the compositionality of large language models in mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate infinite combinations from finite learned components. |
M2DF: Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work mainly utilizes image information to improve the performance of MABSA task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis task that uses image information to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art work on three sub-tasks of MABSA. |
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself . |
Can Language Models Serve as Temporal Knowledge Bases? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have only considered language models as knowledge bases in a static setting . memorizing conflicting information is still challenging for LMs and hinders memorization of other unrelated one-to-one relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose two requirements for treating language models as temporal knowledge bases . they propose a dataset which is aimed at probing temporally-scoped knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can store conflicting information and use stored knowledge for temporal knowledge queries. |
GeoHard: Towards Measuring Class-wise Hardness through Modelling Class Semantics (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in measuring hardness-wise properties of data guide language models in sample selection within low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use class-wise hardness to measure class-specific properties of data in the semantic embedding space by modeling class geometry in the . semantic embeddining space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses instance-level metrics by over 59 percent on Pearson‘s correlation on measuring class-wise hardness. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
An Auxiliary Task Boosted Multi-task Learning Method for Service Account Retrieval with Limited Human Annotation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to service account retrieval have limited human annotation, resulting in labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Auxiliary task Boosted Multi-Task Learning method which introduces multiple auxiliary tasks and enhances the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the main task, service account retrieval. |
FaithLens: Detecting and Explaining Faithfulness Hallucination (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuzheng Si, Qingyi Wang, Haozhe Zhao, Yuzhuo Bai, Guanqiao Chen, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithfulness hallucination detection model that can provide binary predictions and corresponding explanations to improve trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms advanced models on 12 diverse tasks. |
Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline (2022.naacl-main)
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Xiangyang Liu, Tianxiang Sun, Junliang He, Jiawen Wu, Lingling Wu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, researchers are focusing on model efficiency and usability. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models that depicts the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. |
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. |
Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method for training LLMs on long sequences with high throughput and memory efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint compared to baseline methods . it trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs . |
EPiDA: An Easy Plug-in Data Augmentation Framework for High Performance Text Classification (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data augmentation do not fully exploit the potential of DA in NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy and plug-in framework for data augmentation to support effective text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in most cases, but not using agent networks or pre-trained generation networks. |
Enriching Non-Autoregressive Transformer with Syntactic and Semantic Structures for Neural Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation, but their performance is significantly worse than that of autoregressive counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate syntactic and semantic structures among natural languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer for the task of neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves faster speed and keeps translation quality compared with other models. |
Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, especially for villainous characters. |
| Approach: | They propose safety-aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT) to balance role-playing capabilities and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings. |
Unlocking the Potential of Model Merging for Low-Resource Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages requires continual pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging solution that integrates LLMs with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging outperforms CT-then-SFT in low-resource languages with scarce data. |
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. |
Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that contrastive learning improves pre-trained language models to derive high-quality sentence representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to punish false negatives and generate noise-based negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves pre-trained language models while pushing apart irrelevant negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space. |
RoseRAG: Robust Retrieval-augmented Generation with Small-scale LLMs via Margin-aware Preference Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but face high computational costs and latency, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust RAG framework for large language models via Margin-aware Preference Optimization to enhance the accuracy and reliability of SLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on three open-domain question answering tasks. |
MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform multimodal information extraction only investigated entity-based tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings by decomposing the features into image, entity, and context factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to perform on two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results confirm it. |
Collaborative Chain-of-Agents for Parametric-Retrieved Knowledge Synergy (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods focus on external retrieval, while ignoring the rich content of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances explicit synergy over parametric and retrieved knowledge by integrating external retrieval components into the input context of the LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances explicit synergy over parametric and retrieved knowledge. |
3DS: Medical Domain Adaptation of LLMs via Decomposed Difficulty-based Data Selection (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang, Runchuan Zhu, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Weibin Liao, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Effective domain adaptation typically involves supervised fine-tuning on carefully selected instruction-tuned data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-centric data selection framework that aligns data selection with the model’s knowledge distribution to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by up to 2.97% accuracy in the healthcare domain. |
R³A: Reinforced Reasoning for Relevance Assessment for RAG in User-Generated Content Platforms (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to query–document relevance assessment are limited . ambiguous user intent and asymmetric relevance are challenges for RAG platforms . |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reasoning model for relevance assessment that decomposes query intent into intent inference and evidence grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on offline benchmarks and achieves significant gains in large-scale online A/B testing. |
Guaranteeing Knowledge Integration with Joint Decoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang, Yutian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong, Xian Wu
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provides access to external knowledge, but current research focuses on retrieval quality and 'integration bottleneck' . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly decouples reasoning from evidence integration by generating an 'Inner-Answer' and a 'Refer-Aswer" they propose 'a joint decoding mechanism that dynamically fuses the logical coherence of the Inner-Andswer with the factual precision of the Refer-Adswer at the token level' |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 12.1% and reduces hallucinations by 16.3% on five QA benchmarks. |
LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text . |
RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao, Huimin Ren, Zhenlin Wei, Yang Zhou, Jingwen Yang, Shunyu Liu, Kaike Zhang, Chen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating open-ended rubrics suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation . their framework uses principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, difficulty evolution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. |
Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
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Tingyu Song, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Zhuoning Guo, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu
| Challenge: | Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task in multimodal understanding . current CIR benchmarks lack a robust evaluation pipeline and limited query categories . |
| Approach: | They construct a fine-grained CIR benchmark that allows for precise control over modification types and content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 5,000 high-quality queries structured across five main categories and fifteen subcategories. |
Model Merging for Knowledge Editing (2025.acl-industry)
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Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yingying Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Tianshi Ming, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches struggle with sequential editing scenarios and harm the general capabilities of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines robust supervised fine-tuning and model merging for knowledge editing to combine supervised and supervised learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in sequential editing while preserving the original performance of the model. |
Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives, leading to a growing demand for personalized outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that models inter-user differences in the latent space instead of relying on language-based prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on personalized review generation. |
VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiliang Hu, Wenfu Wang, Zuchao Li, Chenxing Li, Yiyang Zhao, Hanzhao Li, Liqiang Zhang, Meng Yu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal conversational systems, current benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation across key dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark built exclusively on real human speech to fill this gap . they assess LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, robustness . |
| Outcome: | VCB Bench assesses LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, and robustness . VCBM Bench provides reproducible and fine-grained framework for Chinese voice chat bots . results show significant performance disparities and offer tangible insights for future improvements . |
Weakly-Supervised Spoken Video Grounding via Semantic Interaction Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on spoken video grounding challenges extracting semantic information from speech . previous studies focused on textual queries, but recent work focuses on spoken queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for weakly-supervised spoken video grounding to represent cross-modal semantics without expensive temporal annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is more efficient than existing methods. |
LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025.coling-main)
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Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | Lack of training data leads to the system cold-start problem in recommendation systems, making them struggle to provide effective recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based LLM recommendation framework which structures all items into an item tree to improve the efficiency of LLM’s item retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baseline model in the A/B test on Huawei industrial system. |
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongkang Wu, Meng Han, Yutao Zhu, Lei Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanhang Ren, Zhicheng Dou, Zhao Cao
| Challenge: | SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples. |
Inductive Relation Inference of Knowledge Graph Enhanced by Ontology Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to inference knowledge graphs lack ontology information, which is often too sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph inductive inference method that fuses ontology information to learn the semantic information of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large language models like ChatGPT on two benchmark datasets and improves the MRR metrics by 15.4% and 44.1%, respectively. |
CB-Whisper: Contextual Biasing Whisper Using Open-Vocabulary Keyword-Spotting (2024.lrec-main)
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Yuang Li, Yinglu Li, Min Zhang, Chang Su, Jiawei Yu, Mengyao Piao, Xiaosong Qiao, Miaomiao Ma, Yanqing Zhao, Hao Yang
| Challenge: | End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems struggle to recognize rare name entities such as personal names, organizations and terminologies that are not frequently encountered in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a convolutional neural network-based ASR system that performs open-vocabulary keyword-spotting before the decoder to match the features between the entities and the utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves mixed-error-rate (MER) and entity recall compared to the original Whisper model on three internal datasets and two publicly available datasets. |
Instance Regularization for Discriminative Language Model Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have optimized independent strategies of ennoising or denosing . Existing methods treat training instances equally throughout the training process . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ennoising and denoising to train discriminative pre-trained language models . they propose to model the complexity of restoring the original sentences from corrupted ones . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method improves pre-training efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness. |
PBoS: Probabilistic Bag-of-Subwords for Generalizing Word Embedding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings assume fixed finite-size vocabularies, hindering their ability to provide useful word representations for out-of-vocaulary words. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generalizes word embeddings without extra contextual information . they use the spellings of words to model subword segmentation and compute subword-based compositional word embeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate meaningful subword segmentations without any source of explicit morphological knowledge. |
Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capability across languages and covers high-resource and low-resourced languages. |
LLM-Driven Knowledge Injection Advances Zero-Shot and Cross-Target Stance Detection (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection focus on background information and not on the accompanying input texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt Large Language Models to explicitly extract the relationship between paired text and unseen target as contextual knowledge and inject it into a generation model BART to exploit the rich contexts and semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to detect stance labels in zero-shot and cross-target scenarios. |
Visual Spatial Description: Controlled Spatial-Oriented Image-to-Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Image-to-text tasks such as captioning and controllable image descriptions have received extensive attention for decades. |
| Approach: | They propose a new perspective for image-to-text to generate spatial descriptions by combining two objects in an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is awe-inspiring and human-like, and the proposed end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems with opaque architectures are limiting deep search capabilities for web-augmented large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transparent and modular multi-agent framework to democratize deep search for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source systems in deep reasoning tasks. |
Representation Degeneration Problem in Prompt-based Models for Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning (PF) models have shown improved performance on few-shot natural language understanding benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to alleviate anisotropy in the embedding space by aligning with pre-trained language models' training objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms mainstream methods on many NLU benchmarks. |
MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiangru Tang, Anni Zou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ziming Li, Yilun Zhao, Xingyao Zhang, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
| Challenge: | Large language models face unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-disciplinary collaboration framework that leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at mining and harnessing medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. |
GAN Driven Semi-distant Supervision for Relation Extraction (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction are limited to costly hand-labeled training sets and hard to be extended to large-scale relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-distant supervision approach for relation extraction by constructing a small accurate dataset and properly leveraging numerous instances without relation labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over baselines on real-world datasets. |
Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA focus on utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations, but they neglect visual-language interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to break down video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance alignment between two modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the NExT-QA benchmark. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
Sentence-Level Agreement for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that a sentence-level agreement module can significantly improve the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence-level agreement module to minimize the difference between the representation of source and target sentences. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show the proposed agreement module significantly improves translation performance. |
Active Testing: An Unbiased Evaluation Method for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from low quality of test set, which leads to considerable biased performance evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate distantly supervised relation extraction using noisy test sets and manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a widely used benchmark show that the proposed method can yield approximately unbiased evaluations for distantly supervised relation extractors. |
PM2F2N: Patient Multi-view Multi-modal Feature Fusion Networks for Clinical Outcome Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on time series data but ignored clinical notes . fusion of multi-modal features of patients from different views is not feasible due to the time series and clinical notes data being stored as time series. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine time series and clinical notes to fuse multi-modal features of patients from different perspectives using graph neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing models on MIMIC-III benchmark. |
Diversifying Content Generation for Commonsense Reasoning with Mixture of Knowledge Graph Experts (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs to encourage various generation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves diversity while achieving on par performance on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations. |
Bayesian Optimization for Controlled Image Editing via LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Chengkun Cai, Haoliang Liu, Xu Zhao, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, John Lee, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | achieving precise control over generated content and maintaining semantic consistency remain significant limitations, particularly concerning grounding techniques and the necessity for model fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-the-shelf approach that integrates Large Language Models with Bayesian Optimization to facilitate precise and user-friendly image editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in editing accuracy and semantic preservation, as validated using different LLMs including Claude3 and GPT-4. |
TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ming Zhang, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Shichun Liu, Huiyuan Zheng, Yurui Dong, Yujiong Shen, Shihan Dou, Jun Zhao, Junjie Ye, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current datasets cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dialogue dataset to train a model that authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a joint accuracy of 75.09% in out-of-domain evaluations . it also achieves notable abilities in slot filling and questioning . |
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. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
OpenDelta: A Plug-and-play Library for Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing implementations that modify the code of the backbone PTMs and hard-code specific delta tuning methods for each PTM have limited the practicality and flexibility of delta tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source library that provides a plug-and-play implementation of delta tuning methods for pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods eliminate the need to modify the backbone PTMs’ code, making OpenDelta compatible with different, even novel PTM. |
Smoothing Dialogue States for Open Conversational Machine Reading (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies train independent or pipeline systems for the two subtasks but are trivial by using hard-label decisions to activate question generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to smooth two dialogue states in one decoder and bridge decision making and question generation to provide a richer dialogue state reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the OR-ShARC dataset. |
MiLoRA: Efficient Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models Fine-tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation and its mixture-of-experts (MOE) methods are highly effective but introduce significant latency in multi-tenant settings due to the LoRA modules and MOE routers added to multiple linear modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation variant that considers each LoRA module as an expert and employs a prompt-aware routing mechanism. |
| Outcome: | Extensive analysis on commonsense reasoning tasks and math reasoning tasks show that MiLoRA outperforms strong PEFT baselines with comparable tunable parameter budgets. |
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (2024.acl-long)
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Le Zhuo, Zewen Chi, Minghao Xu, Heyan Huang, Jianan Zhao, Heqi Zheng, Conghui He, Xian-Ling Mao, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks and induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal large language model (LLM) that can handle protein-centric and protein-language tasks by using a dynamic protein mounting mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict proteins from a vast pool of candidates and can also predict natural language and biological papers. |
Generative Gamer: Learning Equilibrium Strategy by LLM-driven Dynamic Deduction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) falter in domains requiring deep strategic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains LLMs to reason like an expert player . they propose action pruning based on policy confidence, state pruning via value estimation and branch pruning inspired by alpha-beta principles to train the model effectively. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Tic-Tac-Toe and Leduc Poker show that GenGamer significantly improves the strategic capabilities of large language models. |
A Computational Method for Measuring Open Codes in Qualitative Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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John Chen, Alexandros Nikolaos Lotsos, Sihan Cheng, Lexie Zhao, Yanjia Zhang, Jessica Hullman, Bruce Sherin, Uri Wilensky, Michael Horn
| Challenge: | Qualitative analysis is widely adopted across many social science disciplines. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-informed computational method for measuring inductive coding results from humans and GAI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures breadth, consensus, unique contribution, and systematic deviation without assuming ground truth. |
Guiding Neural Entity Alignment with Compatibility (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity Alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs (KGs) labelled data is used to learn neural EA models, but this aspect is neglected . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate compatibility into neural EA models . they aim to find equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs (KGs) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comparable effectiveness with supervised training using 20% of labelled data. |
Robust Tool Use via Fission-GRPO: Learning to Recover from Execution Errors (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiwei Zhang, Fei Zhao, Rui Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang, Jiakang Wang, Yao Hu, Shaosheng Cao, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, but they remain brittle in multi-turn execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts execution errors into on-policy corrective supervision within the RL training loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute and overall accuracy by 4.0% on BFCL v4 Multi-Turn. |
VisiPruner: Decoding Discontinuous Cross-Modal Dynamics for Efficient Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant computational overhead due to the quadratic growth of attention computations with the number of multimodal tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free pruning framework that prunes multimodal tokens without a trained pruning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms existing token pruning methods and generalizes across diverse MLLMs. |
Unveiling the Flaws: Exploring Imperfections in Synthetic Data and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | acquiring large amounts of high-quality data can be challenging due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reverses instruction-following issues caused by uniform format of synthetic data and proposes unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reverses instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. |
Dynamic Feature Fusion for Sign Language Translation Using HyperNetworks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Using RGB and keypoint streams, sign language translation is highly dependent on the brain's ability to process color, shape, and motion simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypernetwork-based fusion method that extracts salient features from RGB and keypoint streams and introduces self-distillation and SST contrastive learning to maintain feature advantages while aligning the global semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public sign language datasets, reducing model parameters by about two-thirds. |
RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Zhihu Wang, Ming Fan, Xicheng Zhang, Yubo Zhang, Zhengfan Wang, Heyuan Huang, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce a module extension that integrates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAG+ outperforms standard RAG variants and achieves gains of 3–5% in complex scenarios. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Gaussian Mixture Latent Vector Grammars (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of latent variable grammars are not observable in treebanks, so latent variables are learned using expectation-maximization. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that extends latent variable grammars such that each nonterminal symbol is associated with a continuous vector space representing the set of (infinitely many) subtypes of the nonterminals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve competitive accuracies in part-of-speech tagging and constituency parsing. |
FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Zhao, Yitao Long, Tintin Jiang, Chengye Wang, Weiyuan Chen, Hongjun Liu, Xiangru Tang, Yiming Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | FinDVer is a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . financial documents are typically long, intricate and dense, and they include both quantita and numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . they assess 25 LLM systems under long-context and RAG settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in financial documents. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
Safety is Not Only About Refusal: Reasoning-Enhanced Fine-tuning for Interpretable LLM Safety (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains models to engage in explicit safe reasoning before response . they propose RATIONAL, which allows models to reject harmful prompts while providing meaningful and context-aware responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fine-tunes models to reason about query intent, ethics, and potential harm. |
How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there is no systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. |
| Approach: | They develop a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances and examine how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes commonly-seen multi-answer instances and analyzes how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced instances. |
Selection and Generation: Learning towards Multi-Product Advertisement Post Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | E-commerce websites have billions of products, so it is impossible to write all copywriting manually. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate an AD post using a select network and a MGenNet network to generate a post including selected products. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive performance on a large-scale real-world AD post dataset. |
Graph Convolution for Multimodal Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documents (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Visually rich documents (VRDs) present information in the form of both text and vision. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolution based model to combine textual and visual information presented in VRDs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two real-world datasets. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
LSTDial: Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Long- and Short-Term Measurement Feedback (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems do not utilize quality dimensions specifically designed for dialogue evaluation to guide the response generation during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework which generates and utilizes conversation evaluation as explicit feedback during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates and utilizes conversation evaluation as explicit feedback during training. |
Tracing Origins: Coreference-aware Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has enriched pre-trained language models with syntactic, semantic and other linguistic information to improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They use a pre-trained language model to leverage coreference information to enhance word embeddings . they use additional encoder layers to focus on coreference mentions or a relational graph convolutional network to model the coreference relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model imitates the human reading process and leverages coreference information to enhance word embeddings. |
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li, Mingyi Wang, Qiao Liu, Qifei Wang, Jiayi Liu, Fei Liu, Serena Li, Weiwei LI, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, Lizhu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on understanding and reasoning over tables, but current approaches remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
Less is More: Knowledge-Aware Compression for Long Legal Judgment Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances leverage large language models (LLMs) for legal reasoning, but they face high computational costs and information degradation when handling long cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively retains legally relevant information while reducing redundant or less informative content, enabling efficient and accurate long-context reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four real-world datasets spanning multiple jurisdictions and languages. |
QuZO: Quantized Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiajun Zhou, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ziyue Liu, Yequan Zhao, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Ngai Wong, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are quantized to lower precision to reduce memory cost and latency in inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantized zeroth-order framework for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using low-precision forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to first-order methods in FP8 and superior accuracy in INT8 and INT4 training. |
KPatch: Knowledge Patch to Pre-trained Language Model for Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media (2024.lrec-main)
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Shuohao Lin, Wei Chen, Yunpeng Gao, Zhishu Jiang, Mengqi Liao, Zhiyu Zhang, Shuyuan Zhao, Huaiyu Wan
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods fail to understand the semantics of tweets . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to flexibly inject knowledge into a pre-trained language model and adaptively expand tweets context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on two training stages to flexibly inject knowledge into the pre-trained language model and adaptively expand tweets context. |
TokenPenalty: Alleviating Attention Sinks and Positional Decay in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to two relevant phenomena: massive activation phenomenon and positional information decay. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level intervention strategy that dynamically suppresses irrelevant visual tokens while preserving key contextual signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenTruth significantly improves factual consistency across MLLMs on standard image understanding benchmarks. |
CoMoL: Efficient Mixture of LoRA Experts via Dynamic Core Space Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Cao, Zhenxuan Fan, Zhuonan Wang, Tianwei Lin, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Feifei Shao, Hongwei Wang, Jun Xiao, Siliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing PEFT methods suffer from limited parameter efficiency and coarse-grained adaptation due to proliferation of LoRA experts and instance-level routing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new MoE-LoRA framework that incorporates expert diversity, parameter efficiency, and fine-grained adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiple tasks while maintaining parameter efficiency. |
DORY: Deliberative Prompt Recovery for LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are used for their groundbreaking performance across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages uncertainty to recover prompts accurately using a single LLM without external resources or models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines across diverse LLMs and prompt benchmarks and establishes a new state-of-the-art record in prompt recovery tasks. |
A Collaborative Reasoning Framework Powered by Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models for Complex Questions Answering over Knowledge Graph (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions by reasoning across multiple triples in knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative reasoning framework powered by RL and LLMs to answer complex questions based on the knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models on four datasets. |
LiTransProQA: An LLM-based Literary Translation Evaluation Metric with Professional Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for literature prioritize mechanical accuracy over artistic expression . this bias could result in an irreversible decline in translation quality and cultural authenticity . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel, reference-free, LLM-based question-answering framework for literary translation evaluation. |
| Outcome: | a novel, reference-free, LLM-based question-answering framework is developed for literary translation evaluation. |
Composite Backdoor Attacks Against Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance on various tasks, but untrustworthy third-party LLMs may covertly introduce vulnerabilities for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a composite backdoor attack that scatters multiple trigger keys in different prompt components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves 100% Attack Success Rate (ASR) with a False Triggered Rate (FTR) below 2.06% and negligible model accuracy degradation. |
Leveraging Large Language Models for Conversational Multi-Doc Question Answering: The First Place of WSDM Cup 2024 (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | WSDM Cup 2024 presents a challenge for conversational multi-doc question answering using large language models . a hybrid training strategy is developed to make the most of in-domain unlabeled data . |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational multi-doc question answering challenge in WSDM Cup 2024 . they adapt LLMs to the task, then devise a hybrid training strategy to make the most of unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach ranked 1st in the WSDM Cup 2024 challenge . it exploits the superior natural language understanding and generation capability of Large Language Models . |
The Role of Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Haoliang Liu, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet their reliability in problem-solving remains debatable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches to enhance LLM reasoning by progressively adapting its reasoning pathways based on problem complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 70.3% accuracy on AIW, compared to 62.2% for Tree of Thought, while maintaining lower computational costs. |
OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Haowei Zhang, Shengyun Si, Yilun Zhao, Lujing Xie, Zhijian Xu, Lyuhao Chen, Linyong Nan, Pengcheng Wang, Xiangru Tang, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation are limited and benchmarked on a limited number of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source tools to reproduce existing large language models for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares existing large language models on 9 table-to-text generation datasets and maintains a leaderboard to provide insights for future work. |
ReFL: Reflective Feedback Learning for Hallucination Detection of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations depend on external knowledge sources, incurring high computational costs and limiting real-time applicability, or extract the model’s internal states, leading to poor generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection framework that leverages corrective in-context learning to guide LLMs to recognize their own prediction errors and adjust internal representations, critically without updating model weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Interpreting Sentiment Composition with Latent Semantic Tree (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current researches on sentiment classification are shifting from improving model performance to interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a new tree form capable of interpreting sentiment composition in a principled way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tree can explain sentiment composition in a principled way. |
Forget the Unneeded: Backdooring Large Language Models via Contrastive-enhanced Machine Unlearning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt tuning for Large Language Models find backdoor attacks to be significant in data-rich scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attacks through contrastive-enhanced machine unlearning in data-limited scenarios . they use a machine un learning method to capture precise backdoor patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures precise backdoor patterns without association between triggers and backdoors, reducing side effects. |
Looking Beyond Text: Reducing Language Bias in Large Vision-Language Models via Multimodal Dual-Attention and Soft-Image Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been criticized for their language bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dual-attention mechanism to construct separate attention for visual and text inputs to enhance integration of visual inputs across models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model debiases LVLMs from their language bias, enhancing visual comprehension and reducing hallucinations without additional resources. |
New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting new intents with labeled data are not cluster-friendly . a robust prototypical attracting learning (RPAL) method is designed to compel instances to gravitate toward their corresponding prototype . |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive prototypical learning framework for globally distinct decision boundaries for both known and new intent categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on CLINC, BANKING, and StackOverflow benchmarks on three challenging benchmarks. |
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 . |
SciSketch: An Open-source Framework for Automated Schematic Diagram Generation in Scientific Papers (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | SCISKETCH is an open-source framework that supports two automated workflows for schematic diagram generation using foundation models. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework that supports two automated workflows for schematic diagram generation using foundation models. |
| Outcome: | The open-source framework outperforms several state-of-the-art foundation models in generating schematic diagrams for scientific papers. |
HyKGE: A Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced RAG Framework for Accurate and Reliable Medical LLMs Responses (2025.acl-long)
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Xinke Jiang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Rihong Qiu, Yue Fang, Zhiyuan Wang, Jinyi Tang, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Recent approaches suffer from insufficient and repetitive knowledge retrieval, tedious and time-consuming query parsing, and monotonous knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework which leverages LLMs’ powerful reasoning capacity to compensate for the incompleteness of user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining the rich knowledge of LLMs with Hypothesis Outputs. |
Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognitive framework that enables step-level error detection and self-correction in Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Who When benchmark and delivers consistent gains on AgentErrorBench. |
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. |
Beyond Compromise: Pareto-Lenient Consensus for Efficient Multi-Preference LLM Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to align LLMs with diverse human values are based on static linear scalarization or rigid gradient projection . however, these approaches often sacrifice potential global Pareto improvements to avoid transient local trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that reimagines alignment as a dynamic negotiation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework breaks the deadlock between static linear scalarization and rigid gradient projection . it allows the model to escape local degradation and explore the distal Pareto-optimal frontier . |
Towards End-to-End Open Conversational Machine Reading (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to the problem of open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) use two separate modules to approach the problem's two successive sub-tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to end style and propose to use a text-based approach to solve the problem. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show that the proposed framework can generalize to different backbone models. |
Mixture-of-Modules: Reinventing Transformers as Dynamic Assemblies of Modules (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that MoMs consistently outperform vanilla transformers . |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for a mixture-of-modules computation that uses a finite set of modules defined by multi-head attention and feed-forward networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms vanilla Transformers and their variants in multiple ways. |
MemeReaCon: Probing Contextual Meme Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Yuxi Zhang, Yanxi Zhao, Yifan Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Huimin Wang, Yutian Zhao, Bin Liang, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong, Xian Wu
| Challenge: | Current approaches focus on isolated meme analysis, either for harmful content detection or standalone interpretation, overlooking a fundamental challenge: the same meme can express different intents depending on its conversational context. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large vision language models understand memes in their original context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates how large vision language models understand meme intent in their original context. |
NovBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Academic Paper Novelty Assessment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating novelty have been proposed, but there is no systematic evaluation of their ability to generate novelty evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models’ ability to generate novelty evaluations in support of human peer review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the quality of LLM-generated novelty evaluations under different prompting strategies. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that human and Large Language Model preferences are important for model fine-tuning and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They dissect the preferences of human and 32 different Large Language Models to understand their quantitative composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with 32 different large language models using real-world user-model conversations. |
Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qibin Wang, Pu Zhao, Shaohan Huang, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Furu Wei, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to test-time scaling are limited due to the quality of candidate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relative improvement of self-refinement beyond majority voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmarks over other methods. |
Priority on High-Quality: Selecting Instruction Data via Consistency Verification of Noise Injection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction selection rely on external models or rules, overlooking the intrinsic association between pre-trained model and instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes noise injection to identify the quality of instruction data without relying on external models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the model trained on the entire dataset and established baselines. |
EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for story evaluation lack reasoning capabilities for open-source models . evolvR framework provides high-fidelity evaluators for story generation tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that self-synthesizes chain-of-thought data via a multi-persona strategy . they propose evolvR to provide a reward model for story generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks . it also enhances the quality of generated stories, validating the superiority of the framework . |
PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce memory usage for large language models neglect inter-layer dependency between layers and huge memory consumption in pre-computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compresses the KV cache by layer-wise retaining crucial context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage by layer-wise retaining crucial context . it can improve 2.2x throughput compared to Accelerate with over 54% memory reduction . |
Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Information Extraction via Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Zhenxi Lin, Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks are a fundamental component of medical NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adaptive constraint strategy to adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach selectively enhances the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs. |
Scene Restoring for Narrative Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Narrative passages describe a chain of events, which helps the machine understand the passage comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to let machine read narrative passages with their prior knowledge . they build a scene graph using Atomic as external knowledge and encode it with GDIN . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on a Story Cloze Test and CosmosQA datasets. |
SmartSpanNER: Making SpanNER Robust in Low Resource Scenarios (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces a Named Entity Head (NEH) prediction task to SpanNER and performs multi-task learning together with task of span classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the robustness of SpanNER in low resource scenarios on the CoNLL03, Few-NERD, GENIA and ACE05 benchmark datasets. |
ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiqi Zhang, Xinbei Ma, Yunqing Xu, Zouying Cao, Pengrui Lu, Haobo Yuan, Tiancheng Shen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Ming-Hsuan Yang
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
STK-Adapter: Incorporating Evolving Graph and Event Chain for Temporal Knowledge Graph Extrapolation (2026.acl-long)
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Shuyuan Zhao, Wei Chen, Weijie Zhang, Xinrui Hou, Junfeng Shen, Boyan Shi, Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) store dynamic facts in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Adapter which integrates the evolving graph encoder and the LLM to facilitate TKG reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities in cross-dataset task. |
Uncertainty-Aware Unlikelihood Learning Improves Generative Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on what to generate but ignore what not to generate . a template-agnostic method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously . |
| Approach: | They propose a template-agnostic method to control the token-level generation . they introduce Monte Carlo dropout to understand the built-in uncertainty of pre-trained language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously on four public datasets. |
Principled Understanding of Generalization for Generative Transformer Models in Arithmetic Reasoning Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models excel in arithmetic reasoning but their generalization capabilities are incompletely understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical framework for understanding the generalization behaviors of transformers in arithmetic tasks, focusing on length generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict generalization behaviors in transformers with a high translation invariance and base mismatch in modular operations. |
Hierarchical Attention Graph for Scientific Document Summarization in Global and Local Level (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document summarization focus on one type of relation, neglecting the simultaneous effective modeling of both relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network-based approach to local and global document summarization using hierarchical discourses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two benchmark datasets and shows that hierarchical structures are important for document summarization. |
StructuThink: Reasoning with Task Transition Knowledge for Autonomous LLM-Based Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | StructuThink framework enhances LLMs' ability to ground decisions in domain-specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-structured reasoning framework that enhances LLM-based agents with explicit decision constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher task success rates and more efficient action sequences than baseline methods. |
LayoutDIT: Layout-Aware End-to-End Document Image Translation with Multi-Step Conductive Decoder (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to capture the visual layout in complex document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate layout knowledge into document image translation by using a layout-aware encoder and a multi-step conductive decoder to achieve the translation step by step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods with better parameter efficiency. |
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. |
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. |
Enhancing Character-Level Understanding in LLMs through Token Internal Structure Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Zhu Xu, Zhiqiang Zhao, Zihan Zhang, Yuchi Liu, Quanwei Shen, Fei Liu, Yu Kuang, Jian He, Conglin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) use tokenization methods but often obscure internal character structures within tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that improves models’ ability to capture character positions within tokens by training them on reverse character prediction tasks using the tokenizer’s vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves position prediction accuracy in large language models, enabling more precise identification of target characters in original text. |
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)
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Guoliang Zhao, Zixin Cui, Chao Ye, Dengwu He, Fei Huang, Yubo Liu, Shuanglong Li, Tzungren Kuo, Bin Ding, Shuang Zhang, null KunhongZhu, Zhi Guo, Liu Lin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
Rumor Detection on Social Media with Crowd Intelligence and ChatGPT-Assisted Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on rumor detection challenges the expressive power of text encoding sequences, and insufficient mining of semantic structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Crowd Intelligence-based semantic feature learning module to capture textual content’s sequential and hierarchical features and a knowledge-based structural mining module that leverages ChatGPT for knowledge enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves performance improvement in rumor detection tasks validating the effectiveness and rationality of using large language models as auxiliary tools. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Circuit Complexity Bounds for RoPE-based Transformer Architecture (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies provide the circuit complexity bounds to Transformer-like architectures. position embedding has emerged as a crucial technique in modern large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use position embedding to improve Transformer-like architectures by analyzing their circuits and analyzing the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to solve canonical tasks without embedding positional information. |
Choose Your Lens: Multi-Perspective Value Alignment of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models tend to hallucinate “convenient” facts to forcefully justify stances . current methods often induce motivated reasoning, causing factual hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework that enables steerable pluralism without distorting objective reality by projecting generated CoT paths onto a multi-perspective graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces factual hallucinations by 3 and improves cross-perspective consistency by 25% compared to standard steerable baselines, paving the way for trustworthy pluralistic AI. |
Improving Meta-learning for Low-resource Text Classification and Generation via Memory Imitation (2022.acl-long)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Zhiliang Tian, Huaxiu Yao, Yinhe Zheng, Dongkyu Lee, Yiping Song, Jian Sun, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Building models of natural language processing (NLP) is challenging in low-resource scenarios where limited data are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory imitation meta-learning method that enhances the model’s reliance on support sets for task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on both text classification and generation tasks. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
RepoGenesis: Benchmarking End-to-End Microservice Generation from Readme to Repository (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Ran Jia, Xu Chen, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated function/class-level generation, neglecting complete microservice repository generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark for repository-level end-to-end web microservice generation that reflects real-world development workflows. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared 106 repositories across 18 domains and 11 frameworks and 1,258 API endpoints and 2,335 test cases. |
AOT*: Efficient Synthesis Planning via LLM-Empowered AND-OR Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluation shows that AOT* achieves competitive solve rates using 3-5 fewer iterations than existing LLM-based approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates LLM-generated chemical synthesis pathways with systematic AND-OR tree search. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that AOT* improves search efficiency and solves faster than existing approaches. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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Liqiang Xiao, Jun Ma, Xin Luna Dong, Pascual Martínez-Gómez, Nasser Zalmout, Chenwei Zhang, Tong Zhao, Hao He, Yaohui Jin
| Challenge: | a new study proposes a conversational search system that integrates product attributes and dialog with search . but it faces two real world challenges: imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end conversational search system that integrates search with text . they propose an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterations from other domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the best tested baseline in a conversational search dataset for online shopping. |
VQA-Augmented Machine Translation with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal machine translation methods often extract visual features using pre-trained models while learning text features from scratch, leading to representation imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal VQA-augmented multimodal machine translation method . it aligns image-source text pairs and image-question text pairs through dual-text contrastive learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics. |
CoCo-Agent: A Comprehensive Cognitive MLLM Agent for Smartphone GUI Automation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current vital challenges for autonomous agents lie in two aspects: dependence on strong (M)LLMs and insufficient GUI environment modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive cognitive LLM agent with two novel approaches to improve GUI automation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks. |
MultiHiertt: Numerical Reasoning over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual Data (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for numerical reasoning over hybrid data only include a single flat table in each document . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark with QA pairs over multi hierarchical tabular and textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more complex and challenging than existing benchmarks and is available on github . it uses facts retrieving to extract relevant facts from both tables and text and symbolic reasoning over retrieved facts. |
Active Learning Approaches to Enhancing Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a limited human translation budget is required to train neural machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate active learning into neural machine translation techniques . they propose a word frequency based acquisition function and an uncertainty based method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other acquisition functions on a limited human translation budget. |
Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongkyu Lee, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn languages only focus on supervised learning, and unlabeled data is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised lifelong language learning setting where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various language tasks and is effective and superior to existing models. |
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. |
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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Xianming Hu, Jingyang Chen, Bin Tang, Yihe Liu, Yihong Huang, Hongbo Zhao, Nuoyi Chen, Jie Zhang, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful tool for NLP applications . but it is challenging to encode large knowledge bases as compact offline structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical graph inference method that uses random walks to retrieve information from a corpus of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces offline indexing costs and accelerates retrieval. |
ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with table-specific architectures and pre-training methods perform well on understanding table structures but lack table reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train tables with table reasoning skills without complex architectures . they define 7 table reasoning skill, and then pre-teach them to generate tables . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on four tasks and is available on github. |
PPTC-R benchmark: Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models for PowerPoint Task Completion (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for task completion in real-world situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a PowerPoint Task Completion-Robustness (PPTC-R) benchmark to measure LLMs’ robustness to the user PPT task instruction and software version (Powerpoint). |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares 3 closed-source and 4 open-source LLMs to the PowerPoint task instruction and software version (Powerpoint) . |
Take Off the Training Wheels! Progressive In-Context Learning for Effective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL) however, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment method that embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses vanilla ICL and achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. |
Reward Difference Optimization For Sample Reweighting In Offline RLHF (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming more capable, but their maximum likelihood objective for the next token prediction falls short in capturing such crucial human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward difference prediction method that uses reward difference coefficients to reweigh sample pairs in offline RLHF and a difference model that considers rich interactions between a pair of responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in both automatic metrics and human evaluation. |
RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension (2026.acl-long)
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Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, XiaoYan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for understanding research papers offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on human-verified QA pairs and contains 15K questions. |
Prompt Conditioned VAE: Enhancing Generative Replay for Lifelong Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative replay methods use only a single task-specific token to control their models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture task-specific distributions with a conditional variational autoencoder, conditioned on natural language prompts to guide the pseudo-sample generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on natural language understanding tasks of advanced task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. |
TCSinger: Zero-Shot Singing Voice Synthesis with Style Transfer and Multi-Level Style Control (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to generate singing voices rich in stylistic nuances for unseen singers due to multifaceted nature of singing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot SVS model for style transfer across cross-lingual speech and singing styles and multi-level style control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TCSinger outperforms baseline models in synthesis quality, singer similarity, and style controllability. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Minyi Zhao, Yi Liu, Jianfeng Wen, Boshen Zhang, Hailang Chang, Zhiheng Ouyang, Jie Wang, Wensong He, Shuigeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better. |
Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, introducing words from irrelevant utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information and fetch the relevant utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets . it can capture the source of important words and fetch the relevant utterance . |
HierGR: Hierarchical Semantic Representation Enhancement for Generative Retrieval in Food Delivery Search (2025.acl-industry)
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Fuwei Zhang, Xiaoyu Liu, Xinyu Jia, Yingfei Zhang, Zenghua Xia, Fei Jiang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Wei Lin, Zhao Zhang
| Challenge: | Generative retrieval (GR) is an emerging search paradigm for food delivery search. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that harnesses the advanced query understanding capabilities of large language models to enhance the retrieval of results for complex and long-tail queries in food delivery search scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method increases the number of online orders by 0.68% for complex search intents. |
MENTOR: Efficient Autoregressive Image Generation with Balanced Multimodal Control (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-image models achieve impressive visual quality but still face challenges in precise controllability, balancing multimodal inputs, and high training cost for multimodal image generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an autoregressive framework with a two-stage training paradigm for controllable multimodal image generation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on DreamBench++ and DreamBech show that the proposed framework achieves a strong balance between textual and visual guidance for controllable image generation. |
MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Tongtong Wu, Wenxuan Zhang, Jiahe Guo, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment are monolingual and struggle with noisy multilingual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reward gaP optimization approach that leverages the well-aligned safety capabilities of the dominant language to improve safety alignment across multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three LLMs, LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2 and Qwen2.5, validate MPO’s efficacy in multilingual safety alignment without degrading general multilingual utility. |
Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly and require manual evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered framework that automates the entire evaluation process using LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 92.14% correlation with human preferences, surpassing all previous expert-annotated benchmarks without any manual efforts. |
Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Cen Zhao, Tiantian Zhang, Hanchen Su, Yufeng Zhang, Shaowei Su, Mingzhi Xu, Yu Liu, Wei Han, Jeremy Werner, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad
| Challenge: | Existing offline approaches to improve an LLM-based customer support system rely on batch annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-in-the-loop framework that integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retraining cycles from months to weeks by integrating four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations. |
Knowledge Graph Embedding with Hierarchical Relation Structure (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models embed entities and relations into latent vectors without leveraging rich information from relation structure. |
| Approach: | They extend existing KGE models to learn knowledge representations by leveraging relation structure . authors say their approach is capable of extending other KGEs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can extend existing KGE models, and validates against baselines. |
AuriSRec: Adversarial User Intention Learning in Sequential Recommendation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on capturing user implicit preferences from historical interactions and matching them with the next behavior, instead of predicting user explicit intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial user intention learning approach for sequential recommendaiton . the approach explicitly predicts user current intentions by taking historical reviews as inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach explicitly predicts user intentions by inferring their decision-making process as explained in target reviews. |
EFUF: Efficient Fine-Grained Unlearning Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to eliminate hallucinations require expensive human annotation . hallucination in multimodal large language models poses unique challenges for current research . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained unlearning framework that performs gradient ascent to eliminate hallucinations without paired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations while preserving quality with modest computational overhead. |
Gradient-Guided Multi-Judge Prompt Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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ChenZhuo Zhao, Xinda Wang, Pu Zhao, Yue Huang, Junting Lu, Ziqian Liu, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prompt optimization trade off signal quality against computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a first-order gradient approximation to score segment importance in a continuous masking direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves efficiency and robustness by using a first-order gradient approximation to score segment importance in a continuous masking direction. |
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fei Zhao, Chengqiang Lu, Yufan Shen, Qimeng Wang, Yicheng Qian, Haoxin Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Zhen Wu, Shangyu Xing, Xinyu Dai
| Challenge: | RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images . |
| Approach: | They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a . |
| Outcome: | The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images. |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
Knowledge Graph Enhanced Neural Machine Translation via Multi-task Learning on Sub-entity Granularity (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate knowledge graph (KG) with neural machine translation (NMT) have two problems: knowledge under-utilization and granularity mismatch. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning method on sub-entity granularity to combine machine translation and knowledge reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models on translation tasks and handling the entities. |
Tiny Budgets, Big Gains: Parameter Placement Strategy in Parameter Super-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods such as LoRA and VeRA use memory-efficient methods to fine-tune large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses only 1–5% of the standard LoRA parameters and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks using only 1–5% of the standard LoRA parameters. |
Virtual Data Augmentation: A Robust and General Framework for Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that powerful pre-trained language models can be fooled by small perturbations or intentional attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-tuning PLMs using a masked language model and Gaussian noise to augment semantically relevant examples with sufficient diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the robustness of pre-trained language models and alleviates performance degradation under adversarial attacks. |
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)
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Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang
| Challenge: | LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases . |
| Approach: | They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks. |
Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning (2024.eacl-long)
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Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Haoliang Wang, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova, Mark Riedl
| Challenge: | Existing prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on two dialogue summarization benchmarks. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
Ruleformer: Context-aware Rule Mining over Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on rule mining focuses on mining rules, but how to select appropriate rules for completion of different triplets has not been discussed. |
| Approach: | They propose to take context information into consideration when selecting suitable rules . they devise a transformer-based rule mining approach, Ruleformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model takes context information into consideration, which helps select suitable rules for inference tasks. |
Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and Skimming (2026.acl-long)
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Jiwei Tang, Shilei Liu, Zhicheng Zhang, Qingsong Lv, Runsong Zhao, Tingwei Lu, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Yujin Yuan, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing task-aware methods require loading the entire input sequence at once for compression, which suffer from computational inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy to reduce computational inefficiency and redundant information in long-context scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAM outperforms baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks while delivering up to a 12x speedup on long inputs. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
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Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
Generate First, Then Sample: Enhancing Fake News Detection with LLM-Augmented Reinforced Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models have a performance gap of 20% between classifying fake news and real news, making them less suitable for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to adopt an LLM to generate fake news in three different styles, which are later incorporated into the training set to augment the representation of fake news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets and improves detection accuracy by 24.02% and 11.06% respectively. |
Effective Sequence-to-Sequence Dialogue State Tracking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using Sequence-to-Sequence models for dialogue state tracking remains an understudied topic. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-training objective and a dialogue context representation to investigate this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more effective than auto-regressive language modeling, the authors show . the proposed model may have a hard time recovering from earlier mistakes, they say . |
How Good Are LLMs for Literary Translation, Really? Literary Translation Evaluation with Humans and LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on literary machine translation (MT) but evaluation of literary MT remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a paragraph-level parallel corpus containing verified human translations and 13k evaluated sentences across four language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus compares human evaluations with students and professionals . it shows that the adequacy of human evaluation is controlled by two factors . |
The Mark Fades: Adaptive Evolutionary Paraphrase-based Attack against LLM Watermarks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paraphrase-based watermark removal methods struggle to balance efficacy with text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free evolutionary framework that models watermark removal as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem by using a Pseudo-Log-Likelihood-guided mutation to precisely target and modify watermark-carrying tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on a Qwen3 series watermark scheme while maintaining high semantic fidelity. |
Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang, Nayu Liu, Guoxin Yu, Zihao Li, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, Ping Luo, Yue Yu
| Challenge: | Existing routing methods rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves matching accuracy while lowering inference costs . it decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements . |
CERES: Pretraining of Graph-Conditioned Transformer for Semi-Structured Session Data (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in self-supervised learning, there is a lack of models that can effectively capture both intra- and intra-item semantics for semi-structured session data. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based transformer model for semi-structured session data that captures both intra- and intra-item semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in three session search and entity linking tasks by up to 9%. |
All That Glitters is Not Gold: Improving Robust Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Fact-Centric Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn adaptive retrieval for noisy documents lack prior filtering and may lead to the loss of crucial information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve retrieval performance without prior filtering . they use LLMs self-generated synthetic data as training data without manual annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs positive document mining based on factual consistency and uses LLMs self-generated synthetic data as training data without manual annotation. |
Leibniz: Theory-of-Mind Driven Neuro-Symbolic Logical Reasoning via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for logical reasoning with large language models suffer from insufficient rule semantic grounding and weak rule application mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-of-mind driven neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that integrates natural language and symbolic representations throughout the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models in reasoning accuracy and flexibility. |
One-shot Learning for Question-Answering in Gaokao History Challenge (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on deep question-answering tasks from admission exams is challenging since it requires effective representation to capture complicated semantic relations between questions and answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural model for deep question-answering task from history examinations using a gated network and a machine labeler. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains substantial performance gains over baseline models in terms of multiple evaluation metrics. |
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. |
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)
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Lirong Gao, Zewei Yu, Zhongrui Yin, Qi Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Sheng Guo
| Challenge: | Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. |
Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large audio-language models focus on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations, but they assume that inputs remain semantically answerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation setting distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
RPDR: A Round-trip Prediction-Based Data Augmentation Framework for Long-Tail Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Long-tail question answering presents significant challenges for large language models due to limited ability to acquire and accurately recall less common knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that selects high-quality easy-to-learn training data to enhance dense retrieval models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two long-tail retrieval benchmarks, PopQA and EntityQuestion, and shows that it outperforms existing retrievers on extremely long-tailed questions. |
Correcting on Graph: Faithful Semantic Parsing over Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Complex multi-hop questions require comprehensive retrieval and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework to establish faithful logical queries that connect LLMs and knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art KGQA methods on knowledge-intensive questions. |
SpanMlt: A Span-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect terms and opinion terms are key problems of fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract aspect and opinion terms as pairs from a sentence . they use shared spans to extract the terms under supervision of span boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both aspects and opinion terms extraction tasks. |
LipoAgent: Coordinating Fine-Tuned LLM Agents for Safer Lipid Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are among the most clinically mature platforms for nucleic acid delivery, yet designing lipids that are effective and biologically safe remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-aware multi-agent LLM framework for lipid discovery that enforces toxicity as a prerequisite for efficiency prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement in mRNA transfection efficiency prediction across multiple foundation models. |
Two Challenges, One Solution: Robust Multimodal Learning through Dynamic Modality Recognition and Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require full-modality data during training phase or require explicit annotations to detect missing modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic modality Recognition and Enhancement for Adaptive Multimodal fusion framework that directs selective reconstruction of missing or underperforming modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms several baseline and state-of-the-art models on three benchmark datasets. |
Summarizing Procedural Text: Data and Approach (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Procedural text summarization task is a popular task in the NLP field because of its long length and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedural text summarization task with two granularity . they propose an Entity-State Graph-based Summarizer (ESGS) which aggregates contextual information for each procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can summarize the entire procedural text or give an overview for each step or both . Experiments on two datasets confirm the proposed model's effectiveness. |
MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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Junjie Zhou, Yongping Xiong, Zheng Liu, Ze Liu, Shitao Xiao, Yueze Wang, Bo Zhao, Chen Jason Zhang, Defu Lian
| Challenge: | despite the growing demand for multimodal retrieval, there is a lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis method that leverages vision language models and open-domain images to generate high-quality data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 70 more datasets and can scale up. |
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 . |
Beyond Reproduction: A Paired-Task Framework for Assessing LLM Comprehension and Creativity in Literary Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as literary translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a paired-task framework that assesses translational creativity using Units of Creative Potential (UCPs) they benchmark 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts to assess translational comprehension . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts on literary excerpts from 11 books. |
PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generation (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating static slides or text summaries are limited to producing narrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal agent that transforms long-form documents into narrated presentations. |
| Outcome: | The present agent produces fully synchronized visual and spoken content that closely mimics human-style presentations. |
Rule-KBQA: Rule-Guided Reasoning for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge base question answering lack grammaticality, faithfulness, and controllability due to hallucinations in the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs learned rules to guide the generation of logical forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results on standard KBQA datasets. |
Representation Purification for End-to-End Speech Translation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance speech translation focus on enhancing knowledge transfer . factors in speech that are not relevant to translation content, such as timbre and rhythm, often limit the efficiency of knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that excludes content-agnostic perturbations from speech representations to mitigate their negative impact on ST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves translation performance across all translation directions in three settings and achieves preeminent performance under a *transcript-free* setting. |
Quantifying the Impact of Structured Output Format on Large Language Models through Causal Inference (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have examined the impact of structured output on LLMs’ generation quality, often presenting one-way findings. |
| Approach: | They propose to derive five potential causal structures characterizing the influence of structured output on LLMs’ generation using one assumed and two guaranteed constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be extended to other modules and is not limited to structured output but can be used in industrial applications. |
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. |
RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning is proposed to reduce the training data size. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve instruction tuning by integrating external knowledge into a single pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results with only 1% of the full dataset. |
ZhuJiu: A Multi-dimensional, Multi-faceted Chinese Benchmark for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Baoli Zhang, Haining Xie, Pengfan Du, Junhao Chen, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Shengping Liu, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Various types of LLMs have recently been rapidly developing, such as Llama2 and ChatGLM2 . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that comprehensively evaluates LLMs across 7 ability dimensions covering 51 tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are comprehensive and systematic, with a high level of accuracy and authority. |
Vision-Language Models Mistake Head Orientation for Gaze Direction: Nonverbal Conversation Cues (2026.findings-acl)
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Zory Zhang, Pinyuan Feng, Bingyang Wang, Tianwei Zhao, Suyang Yu, Qingying Gao, Hokin Deng, Ziqiao Ma, Yijiang Li, Dezhi Luo
| Challenge: | Where someone looks is a nonverbal communication cue that children and adults readily use. |
| Approach: | They used 1,360 real-world photos to construct evaluation stimuli for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they found a substantial performance gap between VLMs and humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting gaze direction using head orientation rather than eye appearance. |
ProPy: Building Interactive Prompt Pyramids upon CLIP for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for PRVR use unimodal features, but powerful pretrained vision-language models like CLIP are underexplored. |
| Approach: | ProPy is a model with systematic architectural adaptation of CLIP specifically designed for PRVR. |
| Outcome: | ProPy outperforms existing models on three public datasets in terms of performance on the datasets. |
D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to achieve outputs that better align with the expected results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates a demonstration validation perspective into this field and integrates it into the learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses all retrieval-based in-context learning techniques across both natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks. |
KnowledgeFMath: A Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning Dataset in Finance Domains (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are only 56.6% accurate, leaving room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in solving knowledge-intensive math reasoning problems using a finance-domain knowledge bank and expert-annotated solution references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves only 56.6% accuracy, leaving room for improvement. |
Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models for Comprehensive Expertise (2025.acl-long)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Ganqu Cui, Xingtai Lv, Weilin Zhao, Kaiyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing models that focus on language, programming code, and mathematical symbols are not able to achieve mastery of all three domains simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse highly-specialized models that are already sufficiently trained on different domains to achieve a highly-specific model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could achieve mastery of the three crucial domains simultaneously. |
Leveraging Argumentation Knowledge Graph for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches focus on sentence matching but the interaction of opinions requires reasoning of knowledge, which is beyond textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external knowledge to enhance the identification of interactive argument pairs by analyzing the discussion thread of the target topic in an online forum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the benchmark dataset. |
IAG: Induction-Augmented Generation Framework for Answering Reasoning Questions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA using retrieval-augmented knowledge are limited by limited coverage and noisy information. |
| Approach: | They propose an induction-augmented generation framework that utilizes inductive knowledge along with retrieved documents for implicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RAG and ChatGPT on two Open-Domain QA tasks. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
ZeroStance: Leveraging ChatGPT for Open-Domain Stance Detection via Dataset Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Until recently, zero-shot stance detection was limited to in-domain tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for stance detection that trains a model that can generalize well to unseen targets across multiple domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generalizes well to unseen targets across multiple domains over baselines on most benchmarks. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinations (2025.coling-main)
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Jiahao Zhao, Jingwei Zhu, Minghuan Tan, Min Yang, Renhao Li, Yang Di, Chenhao Zhang, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | CPsyExam prioritizes psychological knowledge and case analysis separately, recognizing the significance of applying psychological knowledge to real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychological benchmark, CPsyExam, constructed from questions from Chinese examination systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark prioritizes psychological knowledge and case analysis separately, recognizing the significance of applying psychological knowledge to real-world scenarios. |
Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-cultural interference. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment that synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. |
Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems rely on static, hand-crafted update rules for personalization, but sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory guideline optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence. |
ReMamba: Equip Mamba with Effective Long-Sequence Modeling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mamba models demonstrate superior inference efficiency and competitive performance on short-context tasks, but their capacity to comprehend long contexts is limited compared to transformer-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which incorporates selective compression and adaptation techniques within a two-stage re-forward process, incurring minimal additional inference costs overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the LongBench and L-Eval benchmarks by 3.2 and 1.6 points and attains performance almost on par with same-size transformer models. |
Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Weilin Zhao, Yuxiang Huang, Xu Han, Wang Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Xinrong Zhang, Yewei Fang, Kaihuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative drafting, therefore generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better speedup. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses existing model to drafting and target LLM to verify draft in a low-cost parallel manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve speedups of up to 2.4 over speculative decoding and 3.9 over vanilla decoding without fine-tuning draft and target models. |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
Think Before You Act: A Two-Stage Framework for Mitigating Gender Bias Towards Vision-Language Tasks (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models focus on salient attributes but ignore contextualized nuances, resulting in gender bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic generation framework to mitigate gender bias in vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate gender bias in vision-language models . it yields all-sided but gender-obfuscated narratives, which prevents concentration on localized image features, especially gender attributes. |
Awakening Augmented Generation: Learning to Awaken Internal Knowledge of Large Language Models for Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that Large Language Models model rich knowledge, but it is often not activated and awakened. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages richer context to enhance question answering . Explicit awakening fine-tunes a context generator to create a synthetic, compressed document that functions as symbolic context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics the human ability to answer questions using only thinking and recalling to compensate for knowledge gaps. |
LogRules: Enhancing Log Analysis Capability of Large Language Models through Rules (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations when analyzing logs due to the implicit knowledge and rules in logs that LLMs cannot capture. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight log analysis framework that generates and utilizes rules through LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms LLM-based methods in log parsing and anomaly detection tasks and achieves better performance compared to case-based approaches. |
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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Yuming Yang, Wantong Zhao, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Huiyuan Zheng, Yang Nan, Yuran Wang, Xueying Xu, Kaixin Huang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models struggle with complex entity taxonomies in open domains and lack NER capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages. |
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%. |
ART: rule bAsed futuRe-inference deducTion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mengze Li, Tianqi Zhao, Bai Jionghao, Baoyi He, Jiaxu Miao, Wei Ji, Zheqi Lv, Zhou Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-based premises and deduce valid conclusions from visual observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based deductive reasoning task that uses video to deduce the correct future event . they use commonsense knowledge to annotate video and a strong baseline to conduct reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies validate the rationality of ARTNet in deductive reasoning upon visual observations . ART is a method that rigorously follows a set of explicit constraints to deduce valid conclusions from empirical facts . |
VersaTune: An Efficient Data Composition Framework for Training Multi-Capability LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on domain-specific enhancements during fine-tuning, the challenge of which lies in catastrophic forgetting of knowledge across other domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a data composition framework that allows LLMs to enhance their multi-domain capabilities during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-domain fostering performance by 29.77% compared to uniform weights. |
VisCGEC: Benchmarking the Visual Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese grammatical error correction ignore multi-modality and faked errors, which pushes techniques far away from real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark Chinese grammatical error correction for Chinese as a foreign language learner (CFL) using a dataset, they propose to use two CGEC frameworks to conduct experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an F 0.5 score of only 28.9%. |
Suggest-Verify-Revise: A Three-Stage Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Narrative Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level Event Causality Identification rely on local semantic similarity for independent event-pair discrimination . Existing approaches ignore the influence of the overall narrative backbone in the propagation of causal dependencies and the role differentiation of events within multi-cause/multi-effect structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a suggest-verify-revise approach for document-level Event Causality Identification with narrative consistency (SVRECI) they integrate heuristic causal suggestions generated by an LLM with structural suggestions derived from hypergraph modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on event-storylines and Causal-TimeBank datasets. |
SemanticCamo: Jailbreaking Large Language Models through Semantic Camouflage (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made safety issues of LLMs more prominent and critical. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which attacks LLMs through semantic camouflage and replaces unsafe content with semantic features to conceal malicious intent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in over 80% of cases and is highly effective against various defenses. |
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) are used for personalized federated learning . communication costs are high with large PLMs, and local training is expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for federated learning with pretrained language models . they propose 'discrete local search' and compression mechanism for local training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines. |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning . they propose augmentation, evaluation frameworks to measure contextual forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |
Constructing Emotional Consensus and Utilizing Unpaired Data for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue empathy focus on the emotion flow in one direction, from context to response. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-generative model to construct emotional consensus and use unpaired data to produce pseudo paired empathetic samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in producing coherent and empathetic responses. |
Improving Neural Machine Translation by Multi-Knowledge Integration with Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on how to integrate multiple types of knowledge into NMT models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple types of knowledge into NMT models . they use multiple types as prefix-prompts of input for the encoder and decoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on English-Chinese and English-German translation. |
WinoWhy: A Deep Diagnosis of Essential Commonsense Knowledge for Answering Winograd Schema Challenge (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new task is developed to categorize essential commonsense knowledge for the Winograd Schema Challenge . a previous work focused on the classification of commonsensical knowledge by pre-trained models . |
| Approach: | They propose a task that categorizes essential commonsense knowledge for the Winograd Schema Challenge . they leverage the collected reasons to identify plausible reasons from wrong ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to shed light on commonsense knowledge needed for better reasoning . it is based on the collected reasons and a new task called WinoWhy . |
Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, but they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and taxonomy categorizes knowledge into four distinct types . aims to offer a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM research. |
Your Language Model May Think Too Rigidly: Achieving Reasoning Consistency with Symmetry-Enhanced Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Miao Li, William Han, Yuyou Zhang, Emerson Liu, Zuxin Liu, Chuang Gan, Ding Zhao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that enhances LLMs’ awareness of symmetry in query variations and propose syMmetry-ENhanceD (MEND) data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on logical and arithmetic reasoning tasks show that the proposed approach improves model robustness at the knowledge extraction stage through query augmentation. |
Can LLMs Hear the Dogwhistle? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Liu, Yi Lin, Xinwei Guo, Ziwei Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Haiyan Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Existing safety benchmarks focus on explicitly harmful content, but ignore context-dependent expressions such as dogwhistles. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating LLM safety under dogwhistle-driven prompts . their findings expose a blind spot in current safety evaluation practices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared safety performance with toxic terms using dogwhistle-driven prompts. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions. |
RexUIE: A Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal Information Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chengyuan Liu, Fubang Zhao, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Changlong Sun, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models have limited success when extracting general schemas such as quadruples and quintuples. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas and a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for UIE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong performance under full-shot and few-shot settings and achieves state-of-the-art results on the tasks of extracting complex schemas. |
UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce tasks such as multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation are largely ignored due to the diversity of the multimodal fashion domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates image generation with retrieval and text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models across fashion tasks. |
Using Customer Service Dialogues for Satisfaction Analysis with Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (D19-1)
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Kaisong Song, Lidong Bing, Wei Gao, Jun Lin, Lujun Zhao, Jiancheng Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Qiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis . Existing models fail to include satisfaction polarity classification and sentimental utterance identification . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity and reasoning clues. |
ReasVQA: Advancing VideoQA with Imperfect Reasoning Process (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA often fail when complex reasoning or temporal relationships are involved. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages reasoning processes generated by Multimodal Large Language Models to improve VideoQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves VideoQA models on three benchmarks. |
AdaMergeX: Cross-Lingual Transfer with Large Language Models via Adaptive Adapter Merging (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in highresource languages but underperform in lowresource ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual transfer method that decouples "task ability" from "language ability" they propose to use adaptive adapter merging to obtain target adapters by combining other adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in highresource languages . it decouples "task ability" from "language ability" but fails to fully separate "task capability" from the "source language" |
Controllable Style Arithmetic with Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for linguistic style control lack fine-grained control, require extensive computation, or introduce significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-space approach that extracts style-specific representations by analyzing parameter differences between models trained on contrasting styles and incorporates them into a model with precise control over style intensity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves three key capabilities while achieving optimal computational efficiency. |
MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
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Sheng Zhang, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yichao Wang, Xiaowei Qian, Wenlin Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for memory management struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reasoning and agentic search that grows fine-grained memory fragments from seed tokens from queries, then retraces and deep refines the memory via a contribution function. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 significantly mitigates memory dilution and more effectively activates reasoning potential of diverse LLMs. |
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained language models on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cloze-driven prompt framework for prompt tuning that implicitly stimulates knowledge from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art for prompt-based fine-tuning on few-shot NLU tasks. |
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning LLMs often spend tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces when solving new problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration and retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
Datasets for Scientific Literature Understanding: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empowering machines to understand scientific literature is crucial for accelerating scientific discovery and advancing the AI for Science paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
Bring Invariant to Variant: A Contrastive Prompt-based Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph forecasting are insufficient structural contexts to learn effective representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Prompt-based framework with Entity background information for TKG forecasting that brings time-invariant entity background information to time-variant structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and stays competitive in inference with limited structural information. |
CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models struggle to achieve an accuracy of even 60%, which is the pass mark for Chinese exams. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CMMLU to evaluate Chinese multilingual and Chinese LLMs in a comprehensive benchmark that covers various subjects and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and the humanities and aims to improve on existing models. |
Embracing Large Language Models in Traffic Flow Forecasting (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict future traffic flows capture spatio-temporal dependencies, but they fail to adapt to test-time environmental changes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to help traffic flow forecasting by capturing spatio-temporal dependencies and using a large language model to select the most likely result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on large language models (LLMs) and an LLM-based selector. |
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. |
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. |
Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) is a popular NLP task. |
| Approach: | They propose to use QuoraQP to train and evaluate NLSM models using a selection bias framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve generalization ability of trained models and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions. |
Decoding Time Series with LLMs: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Domain Annotation (2026.findings-eacl)
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Minhua Lin, Zhengzhang Chen, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Zongyu Wu, Junxiang Wang, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Time series data is ubiquitous across various domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent system to generate general and domain-specific annotations for time series data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods on synthetic and real-world datasets. |
ClinicalTrialsHub: Bridging Registries and Literature for Comprehensive Clinical Trial Access (2026.eacl-demo)
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Jiwoo Park, Ruoqi Liu, Avani Jagdale, Andrew Srisuwananukorn, Jing Zhao, Lang Li, Ping Zhang, Sachin Kumar
| Challenge: | ClinicalTrialsHub consolidates clinical trial data from ClinicalTrial.gov and augments it by extracting and structuring trial-relevant information from PubMed. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-focused platform that consolidates PubMed data and extracts structured trial information. |
| Outcome: | ClinicalTrialsHub increases access to structured clinical trial data by 83.8% compared to ClinicalTrial.gov alone. |
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding but their visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning that allows MLLMs to explore textual tokens while visual input remains fixed throughout reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong large models such as GPT-4o on high-resolution benchmarks and improves performance on a series of elaborate high-level benchmarks. |
Chameleons and Guardians: Unveiling the Divergence in Personality Plasticity and Cognitive Resistance across LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs argue for its immutability, but prior studies have not found that personality-inducing contexts can be intentionally reshaped. |
| Approach: | They propose a personality-inducing framework that reshapes LLMs via multi-agent collaboration . they paraphrase MBTI questions to create semantically equivalent but expressively diverse inducing contexts . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on worldwide mainstream LLMs show that PIF transforms their original personalities into desired target personalities. |
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1. |
Localized Low-Rank Adaptation within Clustered Parameter Subspaces (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for large language models has been successful in various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform low-rank updates within clustered parameter subspaces . they group rows/columns of update matrix into locally coherent, uncorrelated subspace blocks . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) is better than global adaptations in various domains. |
EmoTransKG: An Innovative Emotion Knowledge Graph to Reveal Emotion Transformation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoTransKG establishes connections and transformations between emotions across open-textual events. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotion Knowledge Graph that establishes connections and transformations between emotions across diverse open-textual events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates with existing conversational emotion recognition models to improve the quality and effectiveness of EmoTransKG. |
ELAD: Explanation-Guided Large Language Models Active Distillation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. |
| Approach: | They propose an Explanation-Guided LLMs Active Distillation framework that employs an active learning strategy to optimize the balance between annotation costs and model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the efficiency of LLMs knowledge distillation. |
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao, Rosella Galindo Esparza, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-resource questions pose a significant challenge within the field of Question-Answering (QA) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large models' internal knowledge to enhance the quality of augmented data by Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing augmentation strategies on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA. |
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current neural architecture search methods suffer from huge computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible recursive backpropagation algorithm that uses the last layer to store the outputs of the network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard Transformers on three sequence-to-sequence datasets. |
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Baosong Yang, Haibo Zhang, Xue Zhao, Wenqing Yao, Boxing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework that integrates lexical and syntactical conditions into a text sequence and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can combine lexical and syntactical conditions and improve paraphrase generation. |
RV-Syn: Rational and Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis based on Structured Function Library (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality reasoning data are limited in quality and availability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs mathematical operations and generates verifiable graphs that are back-translated into complex problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 6.3% performance gain over existing methods on LLaMA-3-8B and outperforms others with only half the training data (50k vs. 100k). |
AlignSTS: Speech-to-Singing Conversion via Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speech-to-singing voice conversion are difficult to learn in text-free situations. |
| Approach: | They propose an STS model which views speech variance as different modalities . it uses a novel rhythm adaptor to predict the target rhythm representation . they also use the predicted rhythm representation to re-align the content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance in terms of objective and subjective metrics. |
Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Alexander Bukharin, Shiyang Li, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Bing Yin, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoming Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to control diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets and validate it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly improves worst and average case performance on large scale instruction tuning datasets. |
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Pan, Rui Yang, Han Wang, Zhuan Zhou, Xuming He, Wenxiang Guo, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Li, Yu Zhang, Chenyuhao Wen, Ke Lei, Xiang Yin, Jingyu Lu, Zhiyuan Zhu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
MoSE: Modality Split and Ensemble for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing entities share relation representation across modalities, which results in mutual interference between modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal knowledge graph completion that learns modality-split relation embeddings for each modality instead of a single modality shared one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three KG datasets. |
Faithful Question Answering with Monte-Carlo Planning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer questions using large language models lack the ability to faithfully follow the intermediate reasoning steps from the known premises to the answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithful question-answering task that uses a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm to produce faithful reasoning steps from the known premises to the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can produce valid and faithful reasoning steps compared with large language models with a much smaller model size. |
Connecting Embeddings for Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness and miss important facts, jeopardizing their usefulness in downstream tasks such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which is trained by utilizing local typing knowledge from existing entity type assertions and global triple knowledge in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model favors inferences that agree with both entity type instances and triple knowledge in KGs. |
Adaptive Parameterization for Neural Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of open-domain dialogue generate responses based on sequence-to-sequence paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Neural Dialogue generation model which manages various conversations with conversation-specific parameterization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on a large-scale conversational dataset. |
Bloom-Eval: A Hierarchical Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Survey Generation Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods suffer from cognitive dimensional simplification and methodological unreliability due to the ”LLM-as-a-Judge” approach. |
| Approach: | They propose a six-tiered benchmark that evaluates ASG systems by prioritizing deterministic algorithms and introducing a GRADE approach for abstract abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method provides the ASG field with a systematic, reproducible, and theoretically grounded benchmark to guide future 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. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
Unveiling Linguistic Regions in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on how LLMs achieve cross-lingual alignment and generalization have not explored the intrinsic mechanisms of how they achieve crosslingual alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to remove a core region that corresponds to linguistic competence and set parameters to zero to reduce performance across 30 different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to perform tasks requiring abstract knowledge and reasoning in complex languages. |
LLM-based Medical Assistant Personalization with Short- and Long-Term Memory Coordination (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on learning and enhancing large language models to understand and generate natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational bionic memory mechanism equipped with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning schema to personalize medical assistants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance the response with aware of previous mistakes for new queries during a dialogue session, but the training costs are prohibitive. |
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 . |
Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on learning deep NER models with weak supervision without any human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can suppress the noise of the weak labels and fine-tune over the strongly labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on Named Entity Recognition tasks with weak supervision and weakly labeled data. |
Domain-specific Attention with Distributional Signatures for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to construct multi-domain task-oriented dialogue systems are difficult to extend to new domains due to high cost of data annotation and scarcity of labeled dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain attention module that uses distributional signatures to construct multi-domain dialogue systems with limited data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on most metrics while keeping smaller model scale. |
Disentangling Language and Culture for Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive evaluations of large language models (LLMs) are conducted on a wide range of models, revealing a notable cultural-linguistic synergy phenomenon, where models exhibit better performance when questions are culturally aligned with the language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Evaluation Framework to comprehensively assess the multilingual capabilities of large language models by decomposing evaluation along dimensions of linguistic medium and cultural context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for a nuanced analysis of LLMs’ ability to process questions within both native and cross-cultural contexts cross-lingually. |
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in multi-step reasoning tasks, yet relying on extensive manual labeling to provide procedural feedback remains a significant impediment. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework that decomposes complex problems into manageable subquestions with a controllable granularity switch and sequentially applies reinforcement learning to iteratively improve the subquest solver. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks over SOTA. |
Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with novelty and Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Reward Model (RM) and a principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge to enhance creative output over baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly enhances creative output over baselines, but the principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge yields superior generation quality. |
Z1: Efficient Test-time Scaling with Code (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve enhanced complex problem-solving through test-time computing scaling, but this often entails longer contexts and numerous reasoning token costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient test-time scaling method that trains LLMs on code-related reasoning trajectories and a novel Shifted Thinking Window to mitigate overthinking overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces overthinking overhead while maintaining performance. |
Spec-o3: A Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Agent for Rare Celestial Object Candidate Vetting via Automated Spectral Inspection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spec-o3 is a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection via interleaved multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Spec-o3 outperforms traditional visual inspection methods on rare-object inspection tasks. |
CHAmbi: A New Benchmark on Chinese Ambiguity Challenges for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguity is an inherent feature of language, whose management is crucial for effective communication and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to evaluate LLMs' ability to handle ambiguity in Chinese by using a specialized Chinese multi-label disambiguation dataset formatted in Natural Language Inference. |
| Outcome: | The CHAmbi dataset comprises 4,991 pairs of premises and hypotheses, including 824 examples featuring a wide range of ambiguities. |
Look before You Leap: Dual Logical Verification for Knowledge-based Visual Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual question generation focus on leveraging the semantics of inputs to propose questions, ignoring the logical coherence between generated questions and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical verification method that checks logical structure between Q, images, answers and acquired outside knowledge by incorporating logical coherence between Q and Q twice in the whole procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate diverse and insightful knowledge-based visual questions on two common datasets. |
Introducing Compiler Semantics into Large Language Models as Programming Language Translators: A Case Study of C to x86 Assembly (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to translate high-level programming languages to machine instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to solve a problem known as neural compilation by using a 13B model with a behavioral accuracy of over 91%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the larger model by over 50% and achieves a behavioral accuracy of over 91% while outperforming the GPT-4 Turbo model. |
Evaluating Cognitive-Behavioral Fixation via Multimodal User Viewing Patterns on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Digital media platforms often contribute to cognitive-behavioral fixation, a phenomenon in which users exhibit sustained and repetitive engagement with narrow content domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal topic extraction module and a cognitive-behavioral fixation quantification module that collaboratively enable adaptive, hierarchical, and interpretable assessment of user behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework lays the groundwork for scalable computational analysis of cognitive fixation. |
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lujie Niu, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Fangkun Zhao, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based Multi-Agent System benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. |
A Survey of Large Language Models for Text-Guided Molecular Discovery: From Molecule Generation to Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are introducing a paradigm shift in molecular discovery by enabling text-guided interaction with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations. |
| Approach: | They analyze the current LLM learning paradigms to tackle four critical evaluation dimensions that have emerged as critical dimensions in recent studies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are able to interact with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations, and have emerging extensions to incorporate multi-modal inputs. |
What Did You Refer to? Evaluating Co-References in Dialogue (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural end-to-end dialogue models have limitations on exactly interpreting the linguistic structures in dialogue history context. |
| Approach: | They propose to directly measure the capability of neural end-to-end dialogue models on understanding the entity-oriented structures via question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand large-scale English and Chinese human human dialogues using a large-format dataset. |
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. |
Diagnosing and Remedying Representation Deficiencies for Deterministic Reasoning in KGQA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve non-deterministic reasoning problems in large language models are limited by their complexity and lack of a clear understanding of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to diagnose and correct non-deterministic reasoning behaviors in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and WebQSP benchmarks on the widely used WebQ SP and CWQ benchmarks. |
The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | entailment a) |
| Approach: | entailment : We want to explore whether Code-LLMs with code prompts are better . encoding a code prompt is better than text-only LLMs, they say . |
| Outcome: | entailment : Our results show that Code-LLMs with code prompts are better compared to text-only LLMs. |
PTQ1.61: Push the Real Limit of Extremely Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization Methods for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sub 2-bit quantization introduce an extra 1-bit or more per weight. |
| Approach: | They propose a sub 2-bit post-training quantization method that enables weight quantization to 1.61-bit for the first time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the upper bound of quantization error to 1.61-bit for the first time. |
Stylized Dialogue Generation with Feature-Guided Knowledge Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods synthesize pseudo data through back translation but lack guidance on target style features. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-augmented stylized dialogue generation model with a feature-guided style knowledge selection module that utilizes context and response features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces a satisfactory performance on two public benchmarks on both semantic and stylized levels. |
LI4: Label-Infused Iterative Information Interacting Based Fact Verification in Question-answering Dialogue (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on fact verification have failed to fully exploit question structures and ignoring relevant label information during the verification process. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach for question-answering dialogue based fact verification using label-infused iterative information interacting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves remarkable performance on HEALTHVER, FAVIQ, and COLLOQUIAL. |
ZhuJiu-Knowledge: A Fairer Platform for Evaluating Multiple Knowledge Types in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | evaluating the knowledge of large language models (LLMs) is crucial, and rapid advancement in large language modeling has heightened the importance of model evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a fairer benchmark for evaluating multiple knowledge types of LLMs by focusing on commonsense knowledge, world knowledge, and language knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 14 current mainstream LLMs and provides a detailed discussion and analysis of their results. |
Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection (2025.acl-long)
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Cilin Yan, Jingyun Wang, Lin Zhang, Ruihui Zhao, Xiaopu Wu, Kai Xiong, Qingsong Liu, Guoliang Kang, Yangyang Kang
| Challenge: | Recent work utilizes feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide prompt optimization . previous methods rely on computational resources and powerful GPUs . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt engineering method that leverages feedbacks from erroneous cases to guide prompt optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods with less steps and lower computational resources. |
Fair Abstractive Summarization of Diverse Perspectives (2024.naacl-long)
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Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Junru Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Xiaoxin Lu, Caiming Xiong, Jieyu Zhao, Dragomir Radev, Kathleen McKeown, Rui Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on summarization metrics and large language models has not explored fair abstractive summarizing. |
| Approach: | They propose four reference-free automatic metrics to measure the differences between target and source perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods alleviate fair abstractive summarization on user-generated data. |
Read Extensively, Focus Smartly: A Cross-document Semantic Enhancement Method for Visual Documents NER (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract entities from visually-rich documents ignore the inherent multimodality of VRDs and thus the suboptimal results are achieved. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal semantic enhancement method that filters redundant information in the current document and a cross-document information awareness technique to enrich the entity-related context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two documents understanding benchmarks covering eight languages. |
G-HiRel: Enhancing the Adaption to Knowledge Updating for Large Language Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have good performance in multiple reasoning tasks, but are limited to adapt the rapid knowledge updates in the real-world scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM reasoning framework with hierarchical relational retrieval for large-scale knowledge updating, named G-HiRel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superiority in terms of accuracy and interpretability on three benchmarks. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Exploiting Pre-Ordering for Neural Machine Translation (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that Neural Machine Translation suffers from the problems that some source words are mistakenly translated for multiple times . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-ordering approach to solve the under-translation problem by pre-ordnanced source sentences and position embedding to enhance monotone translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves translation quality by 2.43 BLEU points on Chinese-to-English translation. |
Rethinking Data Mixing from the Perspective of Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Changwei Xu, XinLong Zhao, Jianing Hao, Ran Chen, Yang Liu, Ruijie Xu, Stephen Chen, Guang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mix data with LLMs have relied on domain definitions derived from intuition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reweighting framework that restructures data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GPT-2 models. |
Toward Recognizing More Entity Types in NER: An Efficient Implementation using Only Entity Lexicons (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing named entity recognition systems require large scale labeled data to perform, while annotation of NER data is laborious and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose to adjust an existing named entity recognition system to recognize entity types not defined in the system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be quickly adjusted to a named entity recognition system. |
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Yida Zhao, Jialong Wu, Liwen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Yu-Feng Li, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enabling LLM web search proficiency struggle with data production in open-search domains, while supervised fine-tuning struggles with data utilization efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without external human-annotated reasoning data. |
| Outcome: | EvolveSearch achieves 4.7% improvement over current state-of-the-art in seven benchmarks . supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains compared with RL . |
Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on scalar rewards to capture user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across reward objectives and targets. |
SparkRA: A Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Service System Based on Spark Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Dayong Wu, Jiaqi Li, Baoxin Wang, Honghong Zhao, Siyuan Xue, Yanjie Yang, Zhijun Chang, Rui Zhang, Li Qian, Bo Wang, Shijin Wang, Zhixiong Zhang, Guoping Hu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific literature LLM and a knowledge service system based on it . they collect scientific literature and then pre-train it using autoregressive training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing functions. |
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinglin Lyu, Wei Tang, Yuang Li, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Junhui Li, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Document-level context is crucial for speech translation due to noise from ASR . incorporating document-level contextual information into ST remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They develop an online framework that integrates document-level context into machine translation . they use document-based modules to integrate document- level context into ST . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in sentence and discourse metrics . it can correct ASR transcription errors and improve translation performance . |
Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Aligning Attention Distribution to Information Flow (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Decode-Only models propagate information from left to right, but the model's attention still focuses on the visual representations, resulting in hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the core information embedded in semantic representations to enhance the model's visual understanding by leveraging the attention distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations by 80% by aligning the attention distribution with the actual information flow. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
Text Detoxification: Data Efficiency, Semantic Preservation and Model Generalization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detoxification of text often rely on manually annotated data . xiangli: "detoxification of texts is a powerful way to remove toxic content" |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes detoxification and semantic preservation without annotating large amounts of data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes major limitations and surpasses humanannotated references across multiple benchmarks. |
Improve Neural Entity Recognition via Multi-Task Data Selection and Constrained Decoding (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Entity recognition is a widely benchmarked task in natural language processing . a neural architecture called BiLSTM-CRF is used to model the language sequences . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture called BiLSTM-CRF to model the language sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art on English entity recognition task and also in other languages. |
Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards focuses on open-ended text generation, requiring either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards the relative information gain between a specialist and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures without external supervision and validates generality across different generation tasks. |
CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling (2024.findings-acl)
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Chenhao Zhang, Renhao Li, Minghuan Tan, Min Yang, Jingwei Zhu, Di Yang, Jiahao Zhao, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets lack consulting knowledge, resulting in LLMs lacking professional consulting competence. |
| Approach: | They propose a report-based multi-turn dialogue reconstruction framework for Chinese psychological counseling that uses large language models to assist counseling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and can be used in future research. |
Plan Dynamically, Express Rhetorically: A Debate-Driven Rhetorical Framework for Argumentative Writing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Argumentative essay generation (AEG) is a complex task that requires advanced semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and organized integration of perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a debate-driven rhetorical framework for argumentative writing that integrates Bitzer’s rhetorical situation theory to improve logical depth, argumentative diversity, and rhetorical persuasiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves logical depth, argumentative diversity, and rhetorical persuasiveness over existing state-of-the-art models. |
EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that events can greatly improve the quality of KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model that incorporates events into KGs . they first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network with event argument links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates event nodes into the original knowledge graphs . it can be used to fuse event information into the KG embeddings on multiple tasks . |
Hi-ArG: Exploring the Integration of Hierarchical Argumentation Graphs in Language Pretraining (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jingcong Liang, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent studies have discussed its capability to assist language models for various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure to organize arguments using the **Hi**erarchical **Ar**gumentation **G**raph (Hi-ArG) and propose two approaches to exploit Hi-AarG, including a text-graph multi-modal model GreaseArR and a framework augmented with graph information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure supersedes existing language models on two argumentation tasks while incorporating graph information during further training improves vanilla language models. |
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanle Zhao, Zilin Sang, Yuxuan Li, Qi Shi, Weilun Zhao, Shuo Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
ICL-Bandit: Relevance Labeling in Advertisement Recommendation Systems via LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lu Wang, Chiming Duan, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Yong Shi, Xuefeng Luo, Bingjing Xu, Weiwei Deng, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a common practice to enhance LLM performance on domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to enhance query-ad relevance labeling . they identify and provide superior demonstrations for ICL, thereby improving labeling performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves query-ad relevance labeling performance by providing demonstrations. |
Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor (2024.findings-naacl)
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Nan Zhang, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Runxue Bao, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning large language models using general or task-specific weights to extract a compressed, task-agnostic LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts a compressed, domain-specific, and task- agnostic LLM by identifying LLM weights that are pivotal for general capabilities, like linguistic capability and multi-task solving, and domain- specific knowledge. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
OmAgent: A Multi-modal Agent Framework for Complex Video Understanding with Task Divide-and-Conquer (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities to multimodal contexts, including comprehensive video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to store and retrieve relevant video frames for specific queries and a Divide-and-Conquer loop capable of autonomous reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model efficiently stores and retrieves relevant video frames for specific queries, preserving the detailed content of videos. |
Ask Question First for Enhancing Lifelong Language Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to stream learning NLP tasks suffer from catastrophic forgetting and are exacerbated when the previous task’s pseudo data is insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new data format to train pseudo questions of previous tasks to stream learning NLP tasks while retaining knowledge of previous ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust to sufficient and insufficient pseudo-data when the task boundary is both clear and unclear. |
View-R1: Asymmetric Policy Optimization for Difficulty-Aware Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data but struggle with complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which separates responses into positive and negative groups to stabilize training and preserve knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model View-R1 achieves a 10.55% improvement in reasoning and outperforms larger models while maintaining and improving performance on general tasks. |
SEER: Self-Aligned Evidence Extraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing RAG performance rely on heuristic-based augmentation . Existing approaches rely heavily on a heuriistic-driven approach, resulting in poor generalization and skews in the evidence length. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based evidence extraction learning framework that optimizes a vanilla model as an evidence extractor with desired properties through self-aligned learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the evidence length by 9.25 times and improves reliability and reliability. |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems via Conditional Variational Autoencoder and Adversarial Training (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for automatic poetry generation lack term novelty and thematic consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional variational autoencoder with adversarial training for classical Chinese poem generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large poetry corpus on 'classical Chinese' . it generates poems with novel terms and learns their thematic consistency with their titles. |
A Unified Syntax-aware Framework for Semantic Role Labeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic information has been paid a great attention over the role of enhancing SRL . but the gap between syntax-aware and syntax-gnostic SRL is smaller . a new framework proposes syntax-based SRL for a wide range of NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend existing models to investigate more effective ways of incorporating syntax into sequential neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on CoNLL-2009 benchmarks in English and Chinese. |
Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aligned Large Language Models exhibit remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse to fine framework to fine-tune aligned Large Language Models to achieve a balance between speciality and versatility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. |
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. |
PED: Route-Decoupled Diagnostics for Persona Consistency in Spoken Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of persona-emotion decoupling frameworks do not isolate which component caused the failure . current evaluations do little to isolate the cause of the failure, making fixes slow and ad hoc . |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic evaluation framework that decomposes persona expression into two observable routes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes persona expression into two observable routes . it can be used to perform route-comparable, reference-based analyses of separability, drift, failures and coupling . |
Detection, Diagnosis, and Explanation: A Benchmark for Chinese Medial Hallucination Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in recent years, but their practical use is hindered by their tendency to generate hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ICD-10 and MeSH to evaluate LLMs' ability to detect medical hallucinations and make accurate diagnoses in noisy environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate LLMs’ ability to detect medical hallucinations, make accurate diagnoses in noisy conditions, and provide plausible explanations. |
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines (2025.naacl-long)
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Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo
| Challenge: | Vision Language Models struggle with cultural-specific knowledge, especially in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects and a training dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better with correct location context, but struggles with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. |
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
Decker: Double Check with Heterogeneous Knowledge for Commonsense Fact Verification (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on grasping unstructured evidence or potential reasoning paths from structured knowledge bases, yet failing to exploit the benefits of heterogeneous knowledge simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense fact verification model that bridging heterogeneous knowledge by uncovering latent relationships between structured and unstructured knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can bridge heterogeneous knowledge by uncovering latent relationships between structured and unstructured knowledge. |
A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Chai, Shunye Tang, Han Xiao, Weifeng Lin, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Rongduo Han, Haining Zhang, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for mobile GUI agents rely on static frame assessments or offline static apps. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation system that leverages large language models as reward models to verify task completion and process achievement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system addresses the limitations of traditional function based evaluation methods on online dynamic apps. |
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. |
VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Pottery (2026.findings-eacl)
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Jinchao Ge, Tengfei Cheng, Biao Wu, Zeyu Zhang, Shiya Huang, Judith Bishop, Gillian Shepherd, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Yang Zhao
| Challenge: | MLLMs that use domain-specific data are limited in understanding cultural heritage artifacts such as ancient Greek pottery . supervised fine-tuning improves adaptation to domain knowledge, but it struggles with deeper reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question-answer tool that augments SFT with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on reasoning-intensive questions on ancient Greek pottery. |
Re-TASK: Revisiting LLM Tasks from Capability, Skill, and Knowledge Perspectives (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhihu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Yu Wang, Heyuan Huang, Sitao Xie, Yubo Zhang, Jiaxin Shi, Zhixing Wang, Hongyan Li, Junchi Yan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving complex tasks with large language models (LLMs) fail to decompose tasks accurately or execute subtasks effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Learning (CoL) paradigm that highlights task dependencies on specific capability items, further broken down into their constituent knowledge and skill components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Yi-1.5-9B and Llama3-Chinese-8B for legal tasks by 45.00% and 24.50% on different domains. |
VideoLLM Knows When to Speak: Enhancing Time-Sensitive Video Comprehension with Video-Text Duet Interaction Format (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on video large language models focus on model architectures and training datasets . interaction format between user and model is unsatisfactory for time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a video-text duet interaction format that allows for continuous playback of the video . when a text message ends, the video continues to play, similar to the alternative of two performers in a duet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed format improves performance on time-sensitive tasks with minimal training efforts. |
Demystifying Data Organization for Enhanced LLM Training (2026.acl-long)
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Yalun Dai, Yangyu Huang, Tongshen Yang, Yonghan Wang, Xin Zhang, Wenshan Wu, Qihao Zhao, Hao Li, Yuanyuan Gao, Kim-Hui Yap, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various fields, yet their training efficiency is heavily reliant on effective data curation. |
| Approach: | They propose to reuse pre-computed sample-level scores originally generated for data efficiency and introduce two new data ordering methods to improve LLM training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the stability and performance of LLM training. |
One-Model-Connects-All: A Unified Graph Pre-Training Model for Online Community Modeling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruoxue Ma, Jiarong Xu, Xinnong Zhang, Haozhe Zhang, Zuyu Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing studies on integrating online community to solve social problems have not fully utilized these three components and the relationship among them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simultaneously considers communities, users, and texts and can easily connect with a variety of downstream tasks related to social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to perform violation detection, sentiment analysis, and community recommendation across multiple tasks. |
LICHEE: Improving Language Model Pre-training with Multi-grained Tokenization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are trained based on single-grained tokenization, making it hard to learn the precise meaning of coarse-grain words and phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model pretraining method that incorporates multi-grained information of input text into pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on CLUE and SuperGLUE in Chinese and English with little extra inference cost. |
Towards Unifying the Label Space for Aspect- and Sentence-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train ABSA model are limited by lack of annotated data . a dual-granularity pseudo labeling approach is proposed to solve this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for aspect-based sentiment analysis that uses annotated data to train ABSA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses previous methods on benchmarks. |
E-Bench: Towards Evaluating the Ease-of-Use of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | E-Bench is a framework for easy-to-use research on large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the ease-of-use of large language models and construct an E-Bench . they simulate human use from synonymous and typographical perturbations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to resist synonymous expressions and typos and improves performance. |
Open Set Relation Extraction via Unknown-Aware Training (2023.acl-long)
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Jun Zhao, Xin Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Wen Chen, Xiang Gao, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing supervised relation extraction methods can still misclassify unknown relations into known relations due to the lack of supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that regularizes the model by dynamically synthesizing negative instances that can provide the missing supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA unknown relation detection without compromising the classification of known relations. |
Moon IME: Neural-based Chinese Pinyin Aided Input Method with Customizable Association (P18-4)
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| Challenge: | a pinyin input method engine (IME) allows users to input Chinese into a computer by typing pinyan through the common keyboard. |
| Approach: | They present a pinyin IME that integrates neural machine translation and IR to offer amusive and customizable association ability. |
| Outcome: | The Moon IME integrates neural machine translation and IR to offer amusive association ability. |
Investigating Capsule Networks with Dynamic Routing for Text Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Earlier efforts in text modeling have achieved limited success on word meanings . convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used to model higher level concepts and facts in texts . |
| Approach: | They propose three strategies to stabilize dynamic routing process to alleviate disturbance of noise capsules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art on 4 out of 6 datasets . they show that capsule networks exhibit significant improvement over baseline methods . |
FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure (2026.acl-demo)
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Fan Zhang, Mingzi Song, Rania Elbadry, Yankai Chen, Shaobo Wang, Yixi Zhou, Xunwen Zheng, Yueru He, Yuyang Dai, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Ayesha Gull, Muhammad Usman Safder, Fan Wu, Liyuan Meng, Fengxian Ji, Junning Zhao, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, YU Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
| Challenge: | FinReporting is an agentic workflow for localized cross-jurisdiction financial reporting . existing approaches assume a single-market setting and overlook structural differences across jurisdictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow that decomposes financial reporting into auditable stages . they use Large Language Models to extract and summarize corporate disclosures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system decomposes reporting into auditable stages . it improves consistency and reliability under heterogeneous reporting regimes. |
Efficient Long-Range Transformers: You Need to Attend More, but Not Necessarily at Every Layer (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer variant with mixed attention spans that leverages the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve competitive performance to models with full attention while reducing computational cost (75%) |
GSM-Noise: Exploring and Enhancing Large Language Models’ Reasoning under Noisy Inputs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle when dealing with complex, ill-formed, or noisy inputs . open-source models are less robust, while closed-source ones are more robust . |
| Approach: | They propose to use GSM-Noise to refine inputs before engaging in in-depth analysis to improve LLM robustness under noisy conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve consistent performance gains under noisy conditions with prompt engineering, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning. |
Web Sitemap Knowledge Can Enhance Autonomous Browsing (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuyao Zhang, Hongyu Lu, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Shiyu Li, Zhao Yang, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Existing web agents suffer from limited robustness, efficiency and task success due to lack of structural understanding of websites and lack of browsing priors in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-oriented sitemap protocol that integrates structured website knowledge into web agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-oriented sitemap improves robustness, efficiency and effectiveness without extra training. |
Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPL significantly enhances LLM personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that emphasizes extracting inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Mingzhe Li, XieXiong Lin, Xiuying Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Feng Wang, Taifeng Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Chu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on contrastive learning on the instance level without discriminating the contribution of each word. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism which can unify semantic meaning in the input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on storytelling, paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks. |
CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL methods focus on making full use of history context, but neglect to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a CQR-SQL that explicitly exploits schema and conversational dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits schema and contextual dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
A Query-Response Framework for Whole-Page Complex-Layout Document Image Translation with Relevant Regional Concentration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document image translation rely on the vanilla encoder-decoder paradigm . a novel dynamic aggregation mechanism is designed to enhance the text semantics in query features toward translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Query-Response DIT framework that reformulates the DIT task into a parallel response/translation process of multiple queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation quality on four translation directions on three benchmarks. |
RobustGEC: Robust Grammatical Error Correction Against Subtle Context Perturbation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems perform well in academic benchmarks, but in practical applications they may not correct errors when users perform irrelevant modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the context robustness of Grammatical Error Correction systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of errors corrected by human annotations. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the primary method for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an Absolute-Rating Multi-Objective Reward Model with multi-dimensional absolute-rating data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the LLM-as-a-judge method on RewardBench . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark . |
Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are lacking in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware T5 model with path-adaptive attention mechanism to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models especially in Macro-F1 and low Macro. |
Can AI Be a Good Peer Reviewer? A Survey of Peer Review Process, Evaluation, and the Future (2026.acl-long)
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Sihong Wu, Owen Jiang, Yilun Zhao, Tiansheng Hu, Yiling Ma, Kaiyan Zhang, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) motivated methods that assist or automate different stages of peer review pipeline. |
| Approach: | They synthesize techniques to enhance peer review generation and after-review tasks aligned to reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the peer review process by fine-tuning strategies, agent-based systems, and emerging paradigms. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
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. |
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. |
InvestAlign: Overcoming Data Scarcity in Aligning Large Language Models with Investor Decision-Making Processes Under Herd Behavior (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | relying on authentic data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is costly and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs high-quality SFT datasets by leveraging theoretical solutions to similar and simple optimal investment problems rather than the complex scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves faster parameter convergence than using real-user data, suggesting superior learning efficiency. |
PDALN: Progressive Domain Adaptation over a Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) are limited in labeled resources and domain shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive domain adaptation knowledge distillation approach to adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains by employing three components to achieve superior domain adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains even if they are diverse in terms and writing styles. |
Unilaw-R1: A Large Language Model for Legal Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning and Iterative Inference (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning-focused large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving across various domains, yet their capabilities in handling complex legal problems remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model tailored for legal reasoning with a 7-billion parameter scale and a two-stage training strategy combining Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all models of similar scale on authoritative benchmarks and outperformed Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct (46.6%) by an average margin of 6.6%. |
A Contrastive Framework for Learning Sentence Representations from Pairwise and Triple-wise Perspective in Angular Space (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning sentence representations focus on constitution of positive and negative representation pairs and do not focus on training objective. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to learn sentence representations using BERT-like pre-trained models . they use a pairwise discriminating power and a model to model the entailment relation of triplet sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on diverse sentence related tasks. |
Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models surpass BERT and T5 on general-purpose text embeddable tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to adopt diffusion language models for text embeddings to overcome limitations in unidirectional attention used during autoregressive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing LLM-based embedding model on reasoning tasks by 20% and 2% on traditional embeddable benchmarks. |
AutoSearch: Adaptive Search Depth for Efficient Agentic RAG via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jingbo Sun, Wenyue Chong, Songjun Tu, Qichao Zhang, Yaocheng Zhang, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin, Dongbin Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work limits search depth to reduce cost, but this often leads to underexploration of complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that evaluates each search step via self-generated intermediate answers. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that AutoSearch achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, alleviating over-searching while preserving search quality. |
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbo Zhao, Huibin Wang, Bin Tang, Xianming Hu, Yihong Huang, Yijun Shen, Nuoyi Chen, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed . |
Part Represents Whole: Improving the Evaluation of Machine Translation System Using Entropy Enhanced Metrics (2022.findings-aacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine translation metrics have poor correlations with human assessments . entropy-based evaluations are often limited to a limited number of samples . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and unsupervised approach to enhance machine translation metrics using entropy by introducing sentence-level difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing metrics on five sub-tracks in the WMT19 Metrics shared tasks. |
Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense methods focus on detecting harmful prompts or reducing the likelihood of harmful responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific editing method to align LLMs to harmful prompts by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models against jailbreak attacks while maintaining performance on benign prompts. |
EventWeave: A Dynamic Framework for Capturing Core and Supporting Events in Dialogue Systems (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Baojun Wang, Zhongyang Li, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems process conversational turns in isolation, overlooking event structures that guide natural interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly models relationships between conversational events to generate more contextually appropriate dialogue responses. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three dialogue datasets show that the proposed approach produces more natural responses while requiring less computational overhead. |
Progressive LoRA for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to MCIT address Catastrophic Forgetting and Knowledge Transfer (KT) but using a fixed number of shared LoRA blocks across tasks can lead to knowledge interference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a fixed number of shared LoRA blocks to reduce knowledge interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches on the latest MCIT benchmark. |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)
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Jun Yan, Mrigank Raman, Aaron Chan, Tianyu Zhang, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Nedim Lipka, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Recent knowledge graph (KG) augmented models have achieved notable success on commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a KG-augmented model that contextualizes extracted and generated knowledge by reasoning over both within a single graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four commonsense reasoning benchmarks and a user study on edge validness and helpfulness. |
Chinese Spelling Corrector Is Just a Language Learner (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that self-supervised learning can improve Chinese spelling correction by removing errors from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decodes Chinese spelling correction models using noise . they say it outperforms current methods that rely on annotated errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the confusion set in specific domains because there are no errors in the training data. |
Leveraging Topic Relatedness for Argument Persuasion (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies of argumentation focus on the effects of factors such as source, audience, and language style, but the impact of exploiting the relationships among controversial topics is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to model topic relatedness among controversial topics using topic embedding features and topic semantics features extracted from the arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves predicting persuasiveness and generalizes to rare topics in a few-shot setting. |
Revisit Self-Debugging with Self-Generated Tests for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Xiancai Chen, Zhengwei Tao, Kechi Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Wanli Gu, Yuanpeng He, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Haiyan Zhao, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation, but they still face challenges when tackling complex programming tasks beyond their basic capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate self-generated tests into the code generation process . they propose to use post-execution and in-exection self-debugging to mitigate test bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models in code generation tasks by leveraging execution feedback from tests. |
Why Machine Reading Comprehension Models Learn Shortcuts? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that many MRC models learn shortcuts to outwit benchmarks, but the performance is unsatisfactory in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use shortcut questions to analyze learning difficulty of MRC models . they propose to analyze the learning difficulty regarding shortcut and challenging questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that a large proportion of shortcut questions in training data make models rely on shortcut tricks excessively. |
KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GUI agents have limited app-specific knowledge of complex mobile tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a 75.8% success rate and 84.6% decision accuracy test across mobile apps. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations (2023.acl-long)
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Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Wenlin Zhang, Xiangru Tang, Boyu Mi, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing Table QA models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations, such as replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on existing Table QA models against human-annotated adversarial perturbations. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
Revisiting the Knowledge Injection Frameworks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Injecting unaligned knowledge tuple into large language models achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than aligned knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to inject random knowledge into large language models to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique overcomes the sanity problem and pushes the performance limit. |
Sign2Vis: Automated Data Visualization from Sign Language (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate natural language descriptions into visualization queries focus on spoken languages, not sign languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a sign language interface that enables the DHH community to engage more fully with data analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface can be used by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. |
Dynamic Planning for LLM-based Graphical User Interface Automation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to planning for GUI tasks are limited due to long historical dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to dynamic planning based on environmental feedback and execution history to guide action prediction in GUI tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses the strong GPT-4V baseline by +12.7% in accuracy. |
TimeR4 : Time-aware Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge in Temporal knowledge graphs (TKTs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Time-aware retrieve-rewrite-retrieve-rerank framework to integrate temporal knowledge from TKGs into Large Language Models (LLMs) to reduce temporal hallucination, they propose rewrite module to rew questions using background knowledge stored in TKG's, then implement a retrieve-rank module to retrieve semantically and temporally relevant facts from Tkgs and rerank them according to temporal constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves relative gains of 47.8% and 22.5% on two datasets, underscoring its effectiveness in boosting the temporal reasoning abilities of LLMs. |
Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on improving attribute consistency focus on incorporating attribute information in responses, but few efforts have identified the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency . they propose to incorporate attribute information into the generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over strong baselines on downstream tasks. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
CoV: Chain-of-View Prompting for Spatial Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Zhao, Akide Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Weijie Wang, Feng Chen, Ruihan Zhu, Gholamreza Haffari, Bohan Zhuang
| Challenge: | Embodied question answering requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints . most recent vision–language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM-Match performance by 11.98% on four mainstream VLMs. |
DINT Transformer (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the DINT Transformer improves accuracy and robustness across practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a differential attention mechanism that suppresses the impact of irrelevant contexts by computing DIF-Ference between two independent attention distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves numerical stability and ability to capture global dependencies. |
Single-to-mix Modality Alignment with Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Image Machine Translation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) faces generalization challenges due to limited training data and the complex interplay between visual and textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-to-mix Modality alignment framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) this framework aligns an imageonly encoder with multimodal representations of an MLLM pre-trained on large-scale document image datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation quality in cross-domain generalization and challenging document image scenarios. |
Exploring Recombination for Efficient Decoding of Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) decoder captures features of entire prediction history . some partial hypotheses with different prefixes will be regarded differently no matter how similar they are . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a n-gram suffix to adapt it to beam search decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can obtain similar translation quality with a smaller beam size, making it more efficient. |
Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for fine-grained few-shot entity extraction are difficult to implement in the chemical domain due to the information overload of scientific papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence based few-shot entity extraction approach . it uses a seq2seq entity extractor and a self-validation module to reconstruct original input sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 8.26% and 6.84% performance gains on two datasets. |
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. |
Code Summarization with Structure-induced Transformer (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Code summarization (CS) is a promising area in recent language understanding . previous work using structurebased traversal or non-sequential models to learn structural program semantics has shown no performance gain . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structure-based traversal model to learn structural program semantics to generate human language automatically for programming language in the format of source code. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on benchmarks. |
T2: An Adaptive Test-Time Scaling Strategy for Contextual Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Huimin Wang, Yutian Zhao, Bin Liang, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong, Xian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing efficient test-time scaling methods introduce budget constraints or early stop mechanisms to avoid overthinking for straightforward questions but add human bias to the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question complexity. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves higher accuracy than baseline methods and reduces computational overhead by up to 25.2%. |
From Role-Play to Drama-Interaction: An LLM Solution (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | aristotle defined drama as a form of storytelling that involves a predefined storyline, emotions and thoughts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to create an immersive mode of storytelling . they propose to create a backbone drama LLM to drive the playing process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to drive the playing process, the authors say . it can be compared with existing models and can be evaluated on multiple scenarios. |
DUAL-REFLECT: Enhancing Large Language Models for Reflective Translation through Dual Learning Feedback Mechanisms (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing self-reflection methods lack effective feedback information, limiting the translation performance of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the dual learning of translation tasks to provide effective feedback, thereby enhancing the models’ self-reflective abilities and improving translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the models’ self-reflective abilities and improves translation accuracy and eliminating ambiguities across translation tasks. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
UORA: Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation in Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods such as LoRA and VeRA use a low-rank approximation method that reduces the number of trainable parameters without compromising performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach that leverages a low-rank approximation method that reduces the number of trainable parameters without compromising performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on GLUE and E2E benchmarks and is effective in instruction-tuning large language models and image classification models. |
Sentence-aware Contrastive Learning for Open-Domain Passage Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on improving negative sampling strategy or extra pretraining for dense passage representations, but these studies are not capturing passage with internal representation conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a smaller granularity to capture internal representation conflicts . they introduce a negative sampling strategy to encourage a diverse generation of sentence representations within the same passage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on three benchmark datasets to alleviate internal representation conflicts. |
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. |
Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on internal reflection ability or external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflection framework that leverages meta-thoughts and self-consistency to enhance the iterative reflection capability of Large LanguageModels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 10.1% over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability. |
Document Image Machine Translation with Dynamic Multi-pre-trained Models Assembling (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing TIMT tasks focus on text-line-level images. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the existing TIMT task and introduce a new framework to translate a source document image to markdown-formatted target translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to translate a source document image with long context and complex layout structure to markdown-formatted target translation. |
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)
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Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Xiaolong Liu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Xi Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
Beyond Timestamps: Bridging Forward and Backward Reasoning in Temporal Numerical and Relational Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Temporal Numerical and Relational reasoning rely on single-task evaluation paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Temporal Numerical and Relational reasoning . they propose QA and verification, and a Consistency Rate to quantify robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates both Temporal Numerical and Relational reasoning . it measures the alignment between QA and FV and the Consistency Rate measures robustness across these directions. |
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) rely on general pre-trained language models without a tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora and a perturbation-based strategy to capture causality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy yields significant and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. |
Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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Zhaoye Fei, Yu Tian, Yongkang Wu, Xinyu Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Zheng Liu, Jiawen Wu, Dejiang Kong, Ruofei Lai, Zhao Cao, Zhicheng Dou, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block lack rationality and interpretation. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm for generalized text representations from the large-scale corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns basic language properties from all tasks and boosts performance on relevant tasks. |
CSL: A Large-scale Chinese Scientific Literature Dataset (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets centered around the English language restrict development of Chinese scientific NLP. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese scientific literature dataset based on Chinese papers . they use semi-structured data as a natural annotation for many supervised NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can serve as a Chinese corpus and perform many supervised tasks. |
MixGR: Enhancing Retriever Generalization for Scientific Domain through Complementary Granularity (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show the importance of document retrieval in the scientific domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach to measure query-document similarity using atomic components in queries and documents to combine them into a united score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous document retrieval methods by 24.7%, 9.8%, and 6.9% on nDCG@5 with unsupervised, supervised, and LLM-based retrievers. |
Extract, Integrate, Compete: Towards Verification Style Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | VGaokao is a verification style reading comprehension dataset for Chinese language tests requiring advanced language understanding skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a new extract-integration-compete approach to extract complementary evidence from Chinese Language tests of Gaokao and a pairwise competition to push models to learn the subtle difference between similar text pieces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on VGaokao with retrieved complementary evidence while having the merits of efficiency and explainability. |
GUI-Bee: Align GUI Action Grounding to Novel Environments via Autonomous Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work of GUI action grounding fine-tunes data from pre-trained MLLMs, but data is limited to specific GUI environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GUI-based agent to collect environment-specific data and fine-tune GUI grounding models with the collected data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be extended to other GUI environments to improve performance. |
Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-based context modeling for multi-turn conversation ignores interactions among previous utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation . they propose to combine previous utterances into context using a deep utterrance aggregation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks including an e-commerce dialogue corpus. |
Question-guided Knowledge Graph Re-scoring and Injection for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to provide factual answers to natural language questions by leveraging structured information stored in a knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a Question-guided Knowledge Graph Re-scoring method to eliminate noisy pathways for the input question, thereby focusing specifically on pertinent factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates noisy pathways for the input question, thereby focusing specifically on pertinent factual knowledge. |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
Double Perturbation: On the Robustness of Robustness and Counterfactual Bias Evaluation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that NLP models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations such as synonym substitutions or syntax-guided paraphrasing. |
| Approach: | They propose a “double perturbation” framework to uncover model weaknesses beyond the test dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves high success rates on both original and robustly trained CNNs and Transformers. |
Span Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models are time-consuming and lack flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a span fine-tuning method which allows for a more efficient and efficient way of incorporating span-level information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GLUE benchmark show that the proposed method significantly enhances the PrLM and offers more flexibility in an efficient way. |
DeMPT: Decoding-enhanced Multi-phase Prompt Tuning for Making LLMs Be Better Context-aware Translators (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Concatenating large language models are adapted to context-aware neural machine translation in a concatenated way . a recent paradigm shift has been witnessed in discourse-related challenges such as zero pronoun translation . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adaptation approach to make large language models discriminately model and utilize inter- and intra-sentence contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms concatenation mode and improves performance in discourse modeling. |
RAVR: Reference-Answer-guided Variational Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that reinforcement learning (RL) can refine the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) but requires a key prerequisite: the model must already be able to generate high-utility reasoning paths with non-negligible probability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses answer-conditioned reasoning as a variational surrogate for question-only reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 benchmarks and 3 models show that RAVR reduces hesitation, strengthens conclusion consolidation, and promotes problem-specific strategies in reasoning. |
Inductive Relation Prediction with Logical Reasoning Using Contrastive Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation prediction in knowledge graphs (KGs) are limited by the inductive setting because entities in training process are finite. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional network-based model LogCo with logical reasoning by contrastive representations that extracts subgraphs and relational paths between two entities to supply the entity-independence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on twelve inductive datasets. |
Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Model with Weak Supervision: A Contrastive-Regularized Self-Training Approach (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Fine-tuned pre-trained language models (LMs) have enormous success in many natural language processing tasks, but they still require excessive labeled data in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable fine-tuning pre-trained language models with weak supervision without any labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the strongest baseline and achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised fine-tuning methods. |
Integrating Representation Subspace Mapping with Unimodal Auxiliary Loss for Attention-based Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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Xulong Du, Xingnan Zhang, Dandan Wang, Yingying Xu, Zhiyuan Wu, Shiqing Zhang, Xiaoming Zhao, Jun Yu, Liangliang Lou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify emotions rely on a large modality gap in their representations . |
| Approach: | They propose a representation subspace mapping module that maps each modality into two distinct subspaces and a cross-modality attention module that leverages auxiliary loss to remove the noise unrelated to emotion classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art MER methods on the IEMOCAP and MSP-Improv datasets. |
WPO: Enhancing RLHF with Weighted Preference Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenxuan Zhou, Ravi Agrawal, Shujian Zhang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Sanqiang Zhao, Kaiqiang Song, Silei Xu, Chenguang Zhu
| Challenge: | Off-policy preference optimization suffers from a distributional gap between the policy used for data collection and the target policy, leading to suboptimal optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to simulate on-policy learning with off-police preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by up to 5.6% on Alpaca Eval 2 and MT-bench. |
WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks, stalling at early sub-goals. |
| Approach: | They propose to assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. |
Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dynamic aspect-oriented semantics-based method to learn ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA on three benchmark datasets. |
Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Earlier studies of instruction tuning on Large Language Models focus on creating large, varied, and high-quality datasets with responses curated by human experts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a smaller and weaker model to fine tune a larger and stronger model . they find it can largely speed up the data filtering and improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter instruction data faster and better on benchmarks. |
ExeCoder: Empowering Large Language Models with Executability Representation for Code Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Minghua He, Yue Chen, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Wenjie Yin, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code translation models only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM specifically designed for code translation called ExeCoder . it uses executability representations such as functional semantics and syntax structures to enhance LLMs' capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing open-source code translation models on two metrics. |
Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing table-to-text generation techniques that transform complex tabular data into comprehensible narratives are lacking in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generate table-to-text data in two real-world information seeking scenarios and perform better than existing models. |
DecorateLM: Data Engineering through Corpus Rating, Tagging, and Editing with Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ranchi Zhao, Zhen Thai, Yifan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Jie Zhou, Yunqi Ba, Jie Cai, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on vast datasets composed of billions of tokens harvested from diverse text sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a data engineering method to refine the pretraining corpus through data rating, tagging and editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of the pretraining corpus by enhancing 100 billion tokens of the training corpus. |
SWE-Mutation: Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Suites in Software Engineering? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxuan Sun, Yuze Zhao, Yufeng Wang, Yao Du, Zhiyuan Ma, Jinbo Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Kai Zhang, Zhenya Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating software engineering capabilities is a core component of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-generated test suites that introduces mutated solutions that attempt to "fool" them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suites are based on 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and include a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. |
Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems. |
MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai, Zhaolu Kang, Yaxuan Guo, Hao Wang, Kexin Zhang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, but systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. |
| Outcome: | MAS-Bench evaluates agent's ability to generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Candidates (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chen Ling, Xuchao Zhang, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Haifeng Chen, Liang Zhao
| Challenge: | Current approaches to commonsense reasoning are limited due to limited answer scope. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve a commonsense question without a pre-defined answer scope . they leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance on two commonsense benchmark datasets. |
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. |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
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Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
Keyphrase Generation with Correlation Constraints (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for keyphrase generation ignore correlation among keyphrases, resulting in duplication and coverage issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sequence-to-sequence architecture for keyphrase generation that captures correlation among keyphrases by preceding phrases to eliminate duplicate phrases and improve result coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art method on benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy and diversity. |
Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated multilingual capabilities, yet they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. |
| Approach: | They extend the evaluation to real-world user queries and non-English-centric LLMs . they show that translation into English can boost LLM performance on NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation extends to user queries and non-English-centric LLMs . it shows that translation into English can boost performance on NLP tasks, but not universally optimal . |
MELOV: Multimodal Entity Linking with Optimized Visual Features in Latent Space (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal entity linking focus on textual contexts but lack in social media vision modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent space vision feature optimization framework MELOV to address these challenges . they exploit variational autoencoder to mine shared information and generate text-based visual features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing methods on three benchmark datasets. |
HumanEval Pro and MBPP Pro: Evaluating Large Language Models on Self-invoking Code Generation Task (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for code generation tasks are inadequate, but performance declines on self-invoking tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks . they propose to use instruction-tuned models to evaluate LLMs on self-invoking code generation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on humanEval and MBPP but on self-invoking code generation tasks. |
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a test suite to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suite incorporates six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies. |
Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification focus on modeling the text, but the concept of sharing among classes has been ignored in previous work. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based method that explicitly represents the concept and model the sharing mechanism among classes for the hierarchical text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
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. |
Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach (2025.findings-acl)
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Yurong Wu, Fangwen Mu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jinjing Zhao, Xinrun Xu, Lingrui Mei, Yang Wu, Lin Shi, Junjie Wang, Zhiming Ding, Yiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. |
Unveiling the Deficiencies of Pre-trained Text-and-Layout Models in Real-world Visually-rich Document Information Extraction (2026.findings-eacl)
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Chong Zhang, Yixi Zhao, Yulu Xie, Chenshu Yuan, Yi Tu, Ya Guo, Mingxu Chai, Ziyu Shen, Yue Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | PTLMs have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks . however, their performance in real-world scenarios falls short of expectations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use an entity-centric dataset to evaluate PTLMs' performance . they find that inadequate annotations in benchmark datasets lead to spurious correlations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset disentangles the falsely-coupled segment and entity annotations that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD. |
On Evaluating the Integration of Reasoning and Action in LLM Agents with Database Question Answering (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a new study evaluates how Large Language Models interact with a SQL interpreter . the model is limited in context and is stochastic, making it less suited for tasks requiring high precision and extensive computations. |
| Approach: | They propose and evaluate two interaction strategies to evaluate how LLMs interact with a SQL interpreter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy and reliability of the evaluations. |
LIMIT-BERT : Linguistics Informed Multi-Task BERT (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models are usually trained on large amounts of unlabeled text data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task language representations learning framework for multi-linguistics tasks by Multi-Task Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline Whole Word Masking BERT on both dependency and constituent syntactic/semantic parsing, GLUE benchmark, and SNLI task. |
Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chong Zhang, Yi Tu, Yixi Zhao, Chenshu Yuan, Huan Chen, Yue Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ya Guo, Huijia Zhu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing models of layout reading order do not convey the complete reading order information in the layout. |
| Approach: | They propose to model layout reading order as ordering relations over layout elements . they propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a visual-rich document dataset and on eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA tasks without targeted optimization. |
KMatrix: A Flexible Heterogeneous Knowledge Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models (K-LLMs) toolkits focus on free-textual knowledge and lack robust datasets, models, and user-friendly experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) using external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | KMatrix: a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit for LLMs includes verbalizing-retrieval and parsing-query methods. |
Beyond Modality Collapse: Taming Guided Modality Entropy for Omni-modal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoOmni is a data paradigm for omni-modal large language models that can be used for emotion reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data paradigm that interleaves guided tokens into reasoning traces to enforce structured evidence extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm over-relys on a dominant modality while neglecting complementary cues. |
LLMs and Copyright Risks: Benchmarks and Mitigation Approaches (2025.naacl-tutorial)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, but their widespread use has raised significant copyright concerns. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI and examine specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
| Outcome: | The course will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI, followed by an examination of specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, Jingyu Lu, Rongjie Huang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Zhiqing Hong, Ziyue Jiang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for song generation fail to generate vocals with prompt-based control and proper alignment. |
| Approach: | VersBand is a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality songs with prompt-based control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that VersBand performs better than baseline models across multiple song generation tasks. |
FineReason: Evaluating and Improving LLMs’ Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving (2025.acl-long)
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Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight an important shift from the “System 1” way of quick reactions to the “system 2” style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-puzzle benchmark for systematic evaluation of large language models' reasoning capabilities that decomposes each puzzle into atomic steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on state checking and state transition tasks and demonstrates gains in reasoning by up to 5.1%. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
Don’t Be Misled by Style: A Style-Adaptive Reranker for Capturing Effective Knowledge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers are mainly trained on well-edited texts, but stylistic features can be misled by reranked models. |
| Approach: | They propose a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations by using an LLM to derive passage-level supervision on whether a passage helps or harms answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that SARK improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions. |
Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for retrievers are narrow and evaluate them in isolation . existing evaluation benchmarking frameworks focus on evaluating retrievers in isolation, obscuring their value in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that evaluates retrievers in agentic search systems . they provide expert-annotated reasoning aspects, positive documents, a reference response and evaluation rubrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses retrievers in agentic search systems. |
GRAG: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Naive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) focuses on individual documents during retrieval and is not suitable for networked documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel divide-and-conquer strategy that retrieves optimal subgraph structure in linear time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on graph reasoning benchmarks. |
Integrating Physician Diagnostic Logic into Large Language Models: Preference Learning from Process Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that large language models can enhance response richness and coherence, but there is a pressing need to bolster the model’s capacity for diagnostic logic to ensure patient safety. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach termed preference learning from process feedback (PLPF) that integrates the doctor’s diagnostic logic into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the diagnostic accuracy of the baseline model in medical conversations by 17.6%, surpassing the performance of traditional approaches. |
CEAN: Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation for Event Extraction (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Event Extraction is a crucial yet arduous task in natural language processing (NLP), as its performance is hindered by laborious data annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation to promote low-resource learning and reduce data noise for event extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ACE2005 and ERE-EN datasets. |
PPTC Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models for PowerPoint Task Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on their zero-shot/few-shot capabilities for basic natural language tasks and their ability to translate instructions into tool APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a PowerPoint Task Completion benchmark to assess LLMs’ ability to create and edit PPT files based on user instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms open-source and closed LLMs with 75.1% accuracy in single-turn dialogue testing but only achieves 6% session accuracy. |
Inductive Reasoning on Few-Shot Knowledge Graphs with Task-Aware Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current knowledge graph reasoning methods rely on extensive structural information to perform in these few-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware language model that activates the language model’s in-context learning ability for structured KG tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in few-shot scenarios while reducing the inference time required by previous methods. |
Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering via Distinguishing Superficially Similar Instances (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing VQA models rely on the superficial correlation between question type and frequent answers to make predictions, without really understanding the input. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between superficially similar instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2 . it explicitly encourages the model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances . |
On the In-context Generation of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have the ability of in-context generation (ICG) when given an in-text prompt, they can implicitly recognize the pattern of the examples and complete the prompt in the desired way. |
| Approach: | They propose a plausible latent variable model to model the distribution of pretrained corpora and formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the distribution of pretrained corpora and then formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction. |
CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
Multifaceted Evaluation of Audio-Visual Capability for MLLMs: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Generalizability and Robustness (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models have been used for processing and understanding information from diverse modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the audio-visual capabilities of multi-modal large language models . they focus on effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities . their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. |
TCSinger 2: Customizable Multilingual Zero-shot Singing Voice Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)
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Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Dongyu Yao, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ziyue Jiang, Yuhan Wang, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot singing voice synthesis models depend on phoneme and note boundary annotations, limiting their robustness and producing poor transitions between phonemes and notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task multilingual zero-shot SVS model with style transfer and style control based on various prompts. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TCSinger 2 outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective metrics across multiple related tasks. |
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025.coling-main)
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Changkai Ji, Bowen Zhao, Zhuoyao Wang, Yingwen Wang, Yuejie Zhang, Ying Cheng, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to assess the risk of bias in RCTs focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing Large Language Models to assess the risk of bias in RCTs by reformulation, document parsing and multi-expert collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the RoB-Item and RoB domains. |
Web Fraud Attacks Against LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly gaining popularity, and its inherent security risks are rapidly becoming a concern. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack manipulating unique structures of web links to deceive MAS by using homoglyph deception, sub-directory nesting, and parameter obfuscation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks exploit unique structures of web links to deceive MAS . they exhibit significant destructive potential across different MAS architectures . |
Alignment Rationale for Natural Language Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation methods pick prominent features, but alignments between words or phrases are more enlightening clues to explain the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate alignment rationale explanations for co-attention based models in NLI by feature selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more faithful and human-readable compared with existing methods. |
From Simple to Complex: A Progressive Framework for Document-level Informative Argument Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event argument extraction use memory to store the results of already predicted events. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple-to-complex progressive framework for document-level event argument extraction . they first calculate the difficulty of each event and then conduct the extraction following a simpler order . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous methods by 1.4% in the document-level EAE task. |
MPBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark for Process Errors Identification (2025.findings-acl)
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xu Zhao Pan, Pengfei Zhou, Jiaxin Ai, Wangbo Zhao, Kai Wang, Xiaojiang Peng, Wenqi Shao, Hongxun Yao, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks of large language models focus on error detection, neglecting other scenarios like reasoning search. |
| Approach: | et al. propose a multi-task, multimodal benchmark to assess effectiveness of PRMs . step correctness, answers aggregation and reasoning process search are evaluated . ethical principles of MPBench are based on a set of evaluation paradigms based in a text-based benchmark . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios . it uses three evaluation paradigms to assess the effectiveness and compares them with existing models . a the proposed model improves reasoning accuracy by providing stepwise feedback for multi-step reasoning results . |
Structural Pre-training for Dialogue Comprehension (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large-scale pre-training language models (PrLMs) have achieved remarkable successes in a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SPIDER to capture dialogue exclusive features from dialogue texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on widely used dialogue benchmarks. |
An Explicit-Joint and Supervised-Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Intent classification and slot filling are key building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts intent and slot representations via bidirectional interactions and extends prototypical network to achieve explicit-joint learning. |
Shorten After You’re Right: Lazy Length Penalties for Reasoning RL (2026.findings-acl)
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Danlong Yuan, Tian Xie, Shaohan Huang, Huishuai Zhang, Zhuocheng Gong, Chong Luo, Furu Wei, Dongyan Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing shortening methods for long reasoning models rely on additional supervision or multi-stage post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a lazy length penalty that imposes length pressure on models without extra training stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces response length without extra training stages while maintaining or improving performance. |
Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination (2026.acl-long)
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Lirong Gao, Zeqing Wang, Yuyan Cai, Jiayi Deng, Yanmei Gu, Yiming Zhang, Jia Zhou, Yanfei Zhang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic knowledge breadth or lexical understanding, failing to capture higher-order skills that are central to historical research. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark anchored in the Chinese Imperial Examination system that assesses historical knowledge and lexical understanding. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark aims to assess the ability of LLMs to process historical materials and documents. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
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Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban aerial spaces remain to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate whether large multimodal models can process continuous first-person visual observations like humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. |
Temporal Knowledge Question Answering via Abstract Reasoning Induction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new method to enhance temporal knowledge reasoning in large language models addresses this challenge . Abstract Reasoning Induction (ARI) framework provides factual knowledge support to LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose an abstract reasoning induction framework which divides temporal reasoning into two phases: Knowledge agnostic and Knowledge-based. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains on two temporal QA datasets. |
Multi-level Relevance Document Identifier Learning for Generative Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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Fuwei Zhang, Xiaoyu Liu, Xinyu Jia, Yingfei Zhang, Shuai Zhang, Xiang Li, Fuzhen Zhuang, Wei Lin, Zhao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods generate DocIDs based on textual content, which may result in weak semantic connections for similar documents due to variations in expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a new retrieval paradigm that generates unique document identifiers . they propose to use queries as a bridge to connect documents with varying relevance levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on multilingual e-commerce search datasets. |
Hard Gate Knowledge Distillation - Leverage Calibration for Robust and Reliable Language Model (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation schemes focus on a teacher as a source of knowledge and a gauge to detect miscalibration of a student. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a teacher model as a source of knowledge and a model as an error detector to detect miscalibration of a student. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme improves model generalization and significantly lowers calibration error. |
Grape: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Passage Reader for Open-domain Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering (QA) models employ a retriever-reader pipeline . however, state-of-the-art readers fail to capture complex relationships between entities . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph enhanced passage reader that captures entities in questions and retrieved passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed knowledge graph enhanced passage reader improves on open-domain QA benchmarks by up to 2.2 exact match scores. |
Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating daily lives and require real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use time-division-multiplexing to process queries and responses pseudo-simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can listen to users while generating output and adjust to provide instant feedback. |
SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ke Lin, Jiahao Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Wentao Zhang, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
Beyond Output Confidence: Epistemic-Aware Hallucination Detection with Answer-Level Signals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations are confounded by epistemic uncertainty and cannot distinguish genuine uncertainty from fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic metric that captures epistemic boundary deviations by measuring answer-level stability across multiple stochastic forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms strong uncertainty-only baselines and can be used to detect hallucinations on open-domain question answering, dialogue generation, and code completion. |
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. |
SynTQA: Synergistic Table-based Question Answering via Mixture of Text-to-SQL and E2E TQA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL parsing and end-to end question answering have yet to be compared and their synergy remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Synergistic Table-based Question Answering approach that integrates different models via answer selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on multiple benchmarks and on large scale datasets. |
Dynamic Context Selection for Document-level Neural Machine Translation via Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level neural machine translation methods use all context sentences in a fixed scope. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to select dynamic context so that document-level neural machine translation models can utilize more useful selected context sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can select adaptive context sentences for different source sentences and significantly improves translation quality over sentences in a document. |
AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weixiang Zhao, Jiahe Guo, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, An Zhang, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Activation steering offers training-free defense but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive activation steering method that dynamically adjusts model behavior based on input characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak attacks with minimal impact on utility. |
UltraEval: A Lightweight Platform for Flexible and Comprehensive Evaluation for LLMs (2024.acl-demos)
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Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Shengding Hu, Ranchi Zhao, Jie Zhou, Hanghao Wu, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation platforms are complex and poorly modularized, hindering seamless incorporation into researcher’s workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight evaluation framework characterized by lightweight, comprehensiveness, modularity, and efficiency that integrates models, data, and metrics into a unified evaluation workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is lightweight, comprehensive, modular, and efficient. |
Is Compound Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Addressed by LLMs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict aspect-based elements from text . large language models (LLMs) have impressive abilities in handling human instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to handle complex ABSA tasks . they use constrained prompts to automatically organize the returned predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised methods in some cases, but it is still lacking in other areas. |
NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Queries (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate code for productive activities, but current benchmarks for code synthesis are oriented towards introductory tasks on algorithm and data science. |
| Approach: | They propose a code benchmark to mirror the complexity and variety of scenarios in real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on 39 large language models with close HumanEval scores and achieves an efficiency increase of more than 4 times. |
RIVAL: Reinforcement Learning with Iterative and Adversarial Optimization for Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tianjiao Li, Mengran Yu, Chenyu Shi, Yanjun Zhao, Xiaojing Liu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qiang Zhang, Jiayin Wang
| Challenge: | Using reinforcement learning from human feedback, large language models perform poorly when applied to colloquial subtitle translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial training framework that iteratively updates the offline reward model and the online LLM to improve training outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework significantly improves upon translation baselines. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving document-level DECI with low-resourced languages under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning for zero-shot cross-lingual ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on monolingual and multilingual scenarios by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score. |
FSUIE: A Novel Fuzzy Span Mechanism for Universal Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Universal Information Extraction models rely heavily on span boundaries in data during training, which does not reflect the reality of span annotation challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses fuzzy spans to model various IE tasks . they propose generative Universal Information Extraction (UIE) to unify various ie tasks based on fuzzy span boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a series of main IE tasks with small amounts of data and training epochs. |
TARA: Token-level Attribute Relation Adaptation for Multi-Attribute Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on multi-attribute controllable text generation ignores interrelations of attributes . recent work defines attribute relations as promotive, but not fixed . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly defines attribute relations as inhibtory for multi-attribute CTG . they propose 'tara' which employs token-level attribute relation adaptation and representation to generate text with the balanced multi-attribut . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates text with the balanced multi-attribute control. |
Decoding the Multimodal Mind: Generalizable Brain-to-Text Translation via Multimodal Alignment and Adaptive Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to decoding language from the human brain rely on unimodal representations, neglecting the brain’s inherently multimodal processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models to align brain signals with a shared semantic space encompassing text, images, and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an 8.48% improvement on the most commonly used benchmark on fMRI datasets with textual, visual, and auditory stimuli. |
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation (2025.naacl-long)
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Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-party data valuation approach that assesses the value of individual data samples and proposes a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, showing significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase. |
Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yijia Xiao, Wanjia Zhao, Junkai Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Han Zhang, Zhicheng Ren, Renliang Sun, Haixin Wang, Guancheng Wan, Pan Lu, Xiao Luo, Yu Zhang, James Zou, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on specific aspects or applications, but this study provides a comprehensive overview of Protein-specific large language models. |
| Approach: | This paper proposes a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs . they analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications. |
Cross-Lingual Pitfalls: Automatic Probing Cross-Lingual Weakness of Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success in Natural Language Processing, yet their cross-lingual consistency remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify cross-lingual weaknesses in Large Language Models . they construct bilingual question pairs that expose performance discrepancies between English and target languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uncovers over 50% accuracy drops in target languages across models. |
Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain adaptation paradigms for reading comprehension require large amounts of annotation data to achieve the desired task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot domain adaptation paradigm for reading comprehension . they introduce self-attention attribution to weigh parameters and refine the lottery subnetwork . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the full model fine-tuning adaptation on four out of five domains with a small amount of data available for adaptation. |
Hard Prompts Made Interpretable: Sparse Entropy Regularization for Prompt Tuning with RL (2024.acl-long)
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Yunseon Choi, Sangmin Bae, Seonghyun Ban, Minchan Jeong, Chuheng Zhang, Lei Song, Li Zhao, Jiang Bian, Kee-Eung Kim
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to find optimal prompt tokens using soft Q-learning to optimize models for prompt tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on baseline prompt tuning, and the results are more natural and interpretable. |
PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain (2024.findings-acl)
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Liang Chen, Yichi Zhang, Shuhuai Ren, Haozhe Zhao, Zefan Cai, Yuchi Wang, Peiyi Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | a new multimodal decision-making benchmark evaluates the integrated capabilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating MLLMs . they propose an automatic evaluation protocol to assess 10 prevalent ML models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves performance of multimodal large language models in three scenarios . the model is required to integrate multiple capabilities to make accurate decisions . |
Domain Adaptation for Person-Job Fit with Transferable Deep Global Match Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve person-job fit in single-domain setting are limited by labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep global match network for capturing the global semantic interactions between two sentences from a job posting and a candidate resume respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective when there is not enough labeled data. |
LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank information require large-scale fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source pipeline for generating diverse, challenging, and realistic reranking examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs competitively on two benchmarks, while being trained on less than 5% of the data typically used in prior work. |
CCIM: Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Image Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on text image machine translation (TIMT) lacks recognized source language information resulting in a decrease in translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal cross-lingual interactive model which incorporates source language information by synchronizing source and target language results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms end-to-end models and has faster decoding speed with smaller model size than cascade models. |
A Novel Global Feature-Oriented Relational Triple Extraction Model based on Table Filling (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Table filling based relational triple extraction methods focus on using local features but ignore the global associations of relations and token pairs, which increases the possibility of overlooking some important information during triple extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a global feature-oriented triple extraction model that makes full use of the two kinds of global associations of relations and token pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
On the Robustness of Editing Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have exhibited impressive success and significant potential. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify the knowledge memory with minimum computational cost while preserving the performance on the retained knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods avoid retraining to update the model parameters and have demonstrated promising performance and efficiency. |
T-REG: Preference Optimization with Token-Level Reward Regularization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a dominant approach for large language models to follow instructions and produce meaningful alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human feedback to optimize large language models . they propose to use sequence-level and token-level rewards to optimize preference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on Alpaca Eval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks. |
Biomedical Concept Normalization by Leveraging Hypernyms (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Biomedical Concept Normalization (BCN) is widely used in biomedical text processing . despite numerous surface variants of biomedically-defined concepts, it remains challenging and unsolved. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses hypernyms and synonyms to facilitate BCN . they use list-wise training to make use of both hypernies and synonym entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model on the NCBI dataset. |
Judging with Many Minds: Do More Perspectives Mean Less Prejudice? On Bias Amplification and Resistance in Multi-Agent Based LLM-as-Judge (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chiyu Ma, Enpei Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Wenjun Liu, Yaning Jia, Peijun Qing, Lin Shi, Arman Cohan, Yujun Yan, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | LLM-as-Judge frameworks provide scalable alternative to human evaluation . but the question of how intrinsic biases manifest in these settings remains unexplored . |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic analysis of four bias types in multi-agent LLM-as-Judge frameworks . they find debate framework amplifies biases sharply after initial debate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks amplify biases after debate and show they are stronger in meta-judge scenarios. |
Understanding Large Language Model Vulnerabilities to Social Bias Attacks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic capabilities across tasks . however, there is a growing concern about their potential to perpetuate social biases . |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs across gender, racial, and religious bias types . they also explore cross-bias and multiple-biases attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are more susceptible to gender bias attacks than racial or religious biases. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs can confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering "I don't know". |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework that fuses evidence from multiple sources and iteratively revises the hallucinous content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. |
Fast Adaptation via Prompted Data: An Efficient Cross-Domain Fine-tuning Method for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in a variety of natural language understanding tasks, but domain discrepancies between the downstream task and the pre-training corpora may have hindered LLMs to excel further in the vertical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast Adaptation method for LLMs via Prompted Data that integrates downstream text corpora, gold labels and external knowledge sources into a highly controllable prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between the downstream task and the pre-training corpora and integrates downstream text corpors, gold labels and external knowledge sources into a highly controllable prompt. |
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
Fixing Semantic Blind Spots in Anchor Tokens of dMLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models (ARMs) are prone to hallucinations due to their sequential text generation and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free decoding strategy that augments the attention key space with a static, distance-aware matrix to reduce the attention sink effect on semantic anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the attention sink effect on semantic anchors while enhancing their ability to aggregate global visual information. |
Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models. |
Unleashing the Potentials of Likelihood Composition for Multi-modal Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal language models with different architectures, parameter sizes, training datasets, and pipelines exhibit varying strengths across different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell, which they call likelihood composition, and introduce basic operations to compose multiple models’ likelihood distribution when doing a multi-choice visual-question-answering task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell. |
Enhancing the Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in Latent Space (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate opendomain dialogues are limited due to the one-to-many nature of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised setting to obtain a smooth latent space that captures discourse-level context information and implicitly models more references in latent spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on two real-world dialogue datasets. |
Revisiting Block-based Quantisation: What is Important for Sub-8-bit LLM Inference? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing quantisation methods mainly focus on 8-bit LLMs . a lack of scaling offsets in the quantisation process limits the use of LLM inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use block quantisations to reduce scaling offsets in Large language models . they find that the block quantizations reduce scaling only from an arithmetic perspective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce scaling offsets solely from an arithmetic perspective without additional treatments in the computational path. |
AuRoRA: A One-for-all Platform for Augmented Reasoning and Refining with Task-Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) lean on handcrafted or task-specific demonstrations and lack reliable knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-for-all platform for augmented reasoning and refining based on chain-of-thought prompting that excels in adaptability, reliability, integrity, and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system exhibits superior performances across six reasoning tasks and offers real-time visual analysis. |
Learning Better Masking for Better Language Model Pre-training (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing PrLMs adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy with a fixed masking ratio and different contents are masked by an equal probability throughout the training. |
| Approach: | They propose two scheduled masking approaches that adaptively tune masking ratio and masked content in different training stages, which improves pre-training efficiency and effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the pre-training efficiency and effectiveness on the downstream tasks. |
A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyu Yang, Sihong Wu, Yilun Zhao, Zhenwen Liang, Lisen Dai, Chen Zhao, Minhao Cheng, Arman Cohan, Xiangliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Multimodal mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has attracted increasing attention for its ability to solve mathematical problems involving both textual and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They review the theoretical frameworks of multimodal reasoning and examine the challenges they face in visual math tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can solve problems involving both textual and visual modalities. |
RJE: A Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration Framework for Efficient Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions using knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves refined reasoning paths and evaluates their sufficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while enabling small open-source LLMs to achieve competitive results without fine-tuning LLM. |
On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Ziyu Zhu, Xintong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Zhongzhi Luan, Bo Dai, Zhenliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Adapting general multimodal large language models to specific domains is important for practical applications. |
| Approach: | They investigate domain adaptation of multimodal large language models via post-training . they develop a generate-then-filter pipeline that curates diverse visual instruction tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in domain adaptation by combining data from open-source models with training pipelines. |
MIE: A Medical Information Extractor towards Medical Dialogues (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | EMRs are important but many doctors suffer from writing them, which is time-consuming and tedious. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic conversion of medical dialogues to EMRs using a window-sliding style . they propose a medical information extractor (MIE) that extracts medical information from medical dialogue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts medical information from doctor-patient dialogues. |
Large Language Models Badly Generalize across Option Length, Problem Types, and Irrelevant Noun Replacements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have exposed patterns and may not truly assess generalization ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a “Generalization Stress Test” to assess Large Language Models’ generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test shows that LLMs exhibit severe accuracy drops and unexpected biases when faced with minor but content-preserving modifications. |
MoEBERT: from BERT to Mixture-of-Experts via Importance-Guided Adaptation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training pre-trained language models have limited practicality due to latency requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a Mixture-of-Experts structure to increase model capacity and inference speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing distillation methods on natural language understanding and question answering tasks. |
WISCA: A Lightweight Model Transition Method to Improve LLM Training via Weight Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Zhidong Yang, Pingwei Sun, Feiye Huo, Jiayu Qin, Xiangyu Zhang, Maoxin He, Guangming Tan, Weile Jia, Xunliang Cai, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in training optimization for Transformer-based large language models lack systematic optimization of weight patterns during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Weight Scaling method that rescales weights while preserving model outputs to improve model training efficiency and model quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves convergence quality and loss reduction in LLMs with Grouped Query Attention architectures and LoRA fine-tuning tasks. |
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a web page and a question, a machine can't understand the contents of web pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel dataset for web-based structural reading comprehension that consists of 400K question-answer pairs and a dataset of 6.4K web pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 400K question-answer pairs, collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. |
ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have excellent performance in evaluation benchmarks, but struggle in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs . they model chain- of-thoughting reasoning as multi-turn conversations to utilize tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on complex reasoning tasks. |
Actively Supervised Clustering for Open Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) use a two-stage pipeline, which learns relation representations and assignments in the first stage, then manually labels relation for each cluster. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs relation learning and relation labeling simultaneously without a significant increase in human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing SOTA methods by 13.8% and 10.6% on two datasets. |
Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities demonstrated by LLMs, the understanding of how these abilities develop and function remains nascent. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel detection method to pinpoint language-specific neurons within LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating these neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can “steer” the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. |
AIGT: AI Generative Table Based on Prompt (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is an essential resource for many fields, but current methods do not fully utilize the rich information available in tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes metadata information to generate tabular data . they propose long-token partitioning algorithms that enable AIGT to model tables of any scale . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on 14 out of 20 public datasets and two real industry datasets within the Alipay risk control system. |
CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory (2025.acl-long)
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Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Shiquan Yu, Ruiying Peng, Baining Zhao, Qian Zhang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing ground VLN agents struggle in aerial VLLN due to the lack of predefined navigation graphs and the exponentially expanding action space in long-horizon exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered aerial VLN agent that decomposes the long-horizon task into sub-goals with different semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvement in continuous city environments. |
Bilateral Masking with prompt for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing word matching methods fail to obtain satisfactory single embedding representations for entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-encoder-based approach to enhance entity representations by using prompts to narrow the distance between the predicted entity and the known entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WN18RR dataset. |
ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Emotion-focused and strategy-driven chain-of-thought (ESCoT) is a new paradigm for emotional support dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional support response generation scheme to improve interpretability . they generate a dataset and develop a model to generate dialogue responses with better interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme can generate dialogue responses with better interpretability. |
RLAE: Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Ensemble for LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ensemble methods for ensembling large language models rely on fixed weighting strategies that fail to adapt to dynamic, context-dependent characteristics of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates LLM ensemble through a Markov Decision Process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 3.3% on a diverse set of tasks while achieving lower time latency. |
MPVStance: Mitigating Hallucinations in Stance Detection with Multi-Perspective Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in large language models, challenges persist due to hallucination-models generating inaccurate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-perspective verification with Retrieval-Augmented Generation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on the SemEval-2016 and VAST datasets. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
A Hierarchical Interactive Network for Joint Span-based Aspect-Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect-sentiment analysis ignore internal correlations between aspect extraction and sentiment classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical interactive network to model two-way interactions between two tasks appropriately using shallow-level and deep-level inputs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods. |
GeoPQA: Bridging the Visual Perception Gap in MLLMs for Geometric Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models, but the impact on multimodal LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that enhances visual perception and fosters reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves geometric reasoning by 9.7% and problem-solving by 9.1% compared to direct reasoning training approach. |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
Efficient Domain Continual pretraining by Mitigating the Stability Gap (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Continual pretraining is an important approach for Large Language Models to improve their performance in target domains, learn new topics and languages, and even boost their general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a training strategy that mitigates instability by increasing the number of epochs, along with two data sampling strategies targeting data domain relevance and corpus distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves the average medical task performance of the OpenLlama-3B model from 36.2% to 40.7% using only 40% of the original training budget, while also enhancing general task performance without causing forgetting. |
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. |
BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness (2026.findings-acl)
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Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
| Challenge: | Currently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the prevailing method for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with function calling capabilities, but its effectiveness is often compromised by two challenges: 1) lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tokens dominate training signals over concise function calls in the learning objective; 2) scarcity of hard training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a self-adjusted signal balancing loss and a hard data re-sampling strategy to selectively generate new, high-quality complex data guided by model errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art models like GPT-5 in function calling performance. |
Self-Training with Differentiable Teacher (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for self-training are interpreted as teacher-student frameworks, where the teacher generates pseudo-labels and the student makes predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a differentiable self-training method that treats teacher-student as a Stackelberg game where a leader is always in a more advantageous position than a follower. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on semi- and weakly-supervised learning tasks on semi and weak supervised tasks. |
Enhancing Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Linyong Nan, Yilun Zhao, Weijin Zou, Narutatsu Ri, Jaesung Tae, Ellen Zhang, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new approach to natural language processing tasks that rely on large language models to make predictions based on context . recent studies have shown that neural symbolic design is the preferred choice for question answering systems because of its limited working memory and unreliable long-term memory. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend in-context learning to question answering tasks that utilize structured knowledge sources and to explore various prompt design strategies for employing LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 2.5 points and the best fine-tuned system by 5.1 points on the Spider dataset. |
LLM-Friendly Knowledge Representation for Customer Support (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to customer support is proposed to integrate large language models with a framework designed to navigate the complexities of Airbnb customer support operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for integrating Large Language Models with a framework designed to navigate the complexities of Airbnb customer support operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is cost-effective and improves customer support performance . it also allows human agents to focus on more complex issues, the authors show . |
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of Named Entity Recognition (NER) are trained on large datasets with predefined entity classes, but data of new classes arrives constantly. Existing work on NER relies on the assumption that there exists abundance of labeled data for the training of new class. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot class-incremental learning problem where NER model is trained with only few labeled samples of the new classes without forgetting knowledge of the old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing baselines by reconstructing training data of old classes and real data from the training set. |
Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Dynamic Personality (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ERC focus on conversational contexts, but focus on static personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that considers the dynamic personality of speakers during conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three benchmark conversational datasets. |
Empathetic and Emotionally Positive Conversation Systems with an Emotion-specific Query-Response Memory (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiliang Tian, Yinliang Wang, Yiping Song, Chi Zhang, Dongkyu Lee, Yingxiu Zhao, Dongsheng Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing emotional conversation systems output responses according to either a given emotion or the user’s emotion reflected in the input queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate empathetic responses catering to the user’s emotions while leading the conversation to be emotionally positive by abstracting the conversation corpus and extracting the different responding strategies for different users’ emotions and conversational topics into a memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the baseline methods in appropriateness, diversity, and generating emotionally positive responses. |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
Selective Prefix Tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained models are time-consuming and memory-inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that inserts learnable vectors into each Transformer layer . they propose SL to encourage diversity in prefix tokens . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Prefix Tuning in sentence and token classification tasks. |
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks. |
Machine Reading Comprehension Using Structural Knowledge Graph-aware Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale datasets specify that external knowledge is required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages external knowledge to construct sub-graphs for entities in machine comprehension context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ReCoRD dataset. |
Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Sensen Gao, Shanshan Zhao, Xu Jiang, Lunhao Duan, Yong Xien Chng, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Jia-Wang Bian, Mingming Gong
| Challenge: | Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. |
Should We Use a Fixed Embedding Size? Customized Dimension Sizes for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to project entities and relations into a low-dimensional space, which is crucial for knowledge completion, fusion, and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed entities and relations into a low-dimensional space to enable knowledge Graphs to be effectively used by downstream AI tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is universal and flexible, suitable for various KGE models. |
Unmasking Style Sensitivity: A Causal Analysis of Bias Evaluation Instability in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess social biases in natural language processing models show unexpected instability when input texts undergo minor stylistic changes. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of how style transformations impact bias evaluation results . they find formal style transformation significantly affects bias scores . larger models show greater sensitivity to stylistic variations, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fails to detect appearance bias, sexual orientation bias, religious bias and religious bias in large language models. |
A Hierarchical Explanation Generation Method Based on Feature Interaction Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on hierarchical attributions tends to limit text groups to a continuous text span, which is difficult for humans to read. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which captures feature interactions and converts non-hierarchical explanations into hierarchical versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can convert ubiquitous non-hierarchical explanations into their corresponding hierarchical versions. |
Born a BabyNet with Hierarchical Parental Supervision for End-to-End Text Image Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on text image machine translation (TIMT) is divided into two types: Cascade methods combine text image recognition and MT models to recognize source language text images. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which is optimized with hierarchical parental supervision to improve translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on synthetic and real-world tests on both synthetic and realistic images. |
The Knowledge Alignment Problem: Bridging Human and External Knowledge for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models often ignore external knowledge to generate accurate answers . despite correct groundings, they can rely on wrong grounding or biases to hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates human and human user clarifications to improve knowledge alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance and mitigates hallucination by producing user-centered clarifications. |
KoCo-Bench: Can Large Language Models Leverage Domain Knowledge in Software Development? (2026.acl-long)
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Xue Jiang, Ge Li, Jiaru Qian, Xianjie Shi, Chenjie Li, Hao Zhu, Ziyu Wang, Jielun Zhang, Zeyu Zhao, Kechi Zhang, Jia Li, Wenpin Jiao, Zhi Jin, Yihong Dong
| Challenge: | Existing domain-specific code benchmarks focus on assessing what knowledge LLMs possess rather than how they acquire and apply new knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate domain specialization methods in real-world software development. |
| Outcome: | KOCO-bench is a new benchmark for evaluating domain specialization methods in real-world software development. |
PACAR: Automated Fact-Checking with Planning and Customized Action Reasoning Using Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on idealized "gold" evidence for predictions, which is unrealistic due to its limited availability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework based on planning and customized action reasoning using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across three datasets and with varying complexity levels. |
MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System (2026.acl-long)
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Weixin Chen, Yuhan Zhao, Jingyuan Huang, Zihe Ye, Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Li Chen, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing recommender systems rely on semantic user and item memories to make predictions, but these memories are kept in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that architecturally decouples memory management from reasoning to decouple memory management and reasoning from the user and item memories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples memory management from reasoning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks. |
VisBias: Measuring Explicit and Implicit Social Biases in Vision Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and addressing potential social biases is essential to prevent harm to users. |
| Approach: | They examine explicit and implicit biases exhibited by Vision-Language Models . they pose questions related to gender and racial differences to test their models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are used in image description tasks, form completion tasks and medical applications. |
Improving MLLM’s Document Image Machine Translation via Synchronously Self-reviewing Its OCR Proficiency (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in document image tasks, especially Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, they struggle with Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT), which requires handling both cross-modal and cross-lingual challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuning paradigm that allows the model to generate OCR text before producing translation text, which allows it to leverage its strong monolingual OCR ability while learning to translate text across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leverage its strong monolingual OCR ability while learning to translate text across languages. |
Redundancy Principles for MLLMs Benchmarks (2025.acl-long)
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Zicheng Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Xinyu Fang, Chunyi Li, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen, Guangtao Zhai
| Challenge: | Rapid growth of Multi-modality Large Language Models has led to significant redundancy among benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve MLLM benchmark design by identifying redundancy at three levels: dimension, instance, and cross-benchmark redundancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework streamlines evaluations and enhances reliability. |
PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Zijing Wang, YongKang Liu, Mingyang Wang, Ercong Nie, Deyuan Chen, Zhengjie Zhao, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Multimodal instruction fine-tuning degrades textual reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs to mitigate this degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces multimodal instruction fine-tuning degradation by incorporating a plateau-guided model merging method into MLLMs. |
DopplerBAS: Binaural Audio Synthesis Addressing Doppler Effect (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for binaural audio synthesis are limited in phase estimation, which is crucial for spatial hearing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to explicitly address the Doppler effect of the moving speaker . it calculates the radial relative velocity of the speaker in spherical coordinates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the representative WarpNet and BinauralGrad backbones in phase error metric and reaches a new state of the art (SOTA) it is compared with the current method which is limited in phase estimation . |
Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level adversarial approaches for textual data have various limitations due to the large search space consisting of combinations of candidate words. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to original texts without perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets compared with state-of-the-art approaches. |
SQL Injection Jailbreak: A Structural Disaster of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) exploited internal properties or capabilities of the model, such as optimization-based jailbreak methods and methods that leveraged the model’s context-learning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method which injects jailbreak information into user prompts and induces the model to generate harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves near 100% success rates on open-source models while incurring lower time costs compared to previous methods. |
A Relaxed Matching Procedure for Unsupervised BLI (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction is even on par with supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a relaxed matching procedure to find a more precise matching between two languages by aligning source and target embedding space bidirectionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms previous unsupervised methods on standard benchmarks. |
Beyond Glass-Box Features: Uncertainty Quantification Enhanced Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Quality Estimation (QE) is an essential role in applications of Machine Translation (MT). |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse uncertainty quantification into a pre-trained cross-lingual language model to predict the translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the datasets of WMT 2020 QE shared task. |
SKIntern: Internalizing Symbolic Knowledge for Distilling Better CoT Capabilities into Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have high computational costs and privacy concerns due to their high computational expenses and data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5% while reducing inference costs by up to 4 across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of domain (OOD) tasks. |
Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Short Product Title Generation in Mobile E-Commerce (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for short product title generation only consider textual information from long titles . MM-GAN incorporates image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual info from original long titles. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal generative adversarial network for short product title generation in E-commerce . they incorporate image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual information from original long titles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale E-commerce dataset. |
Multilingual Federated Low-Rank Adaptation for Collaborative Content Anomaly Detection across Multilingual Social Media Participants (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent developments in multilingual social media platforms (SNS) exacerbate new challenges in SNS content anomaly detection due to data islands and linguistic imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual Federated LoRA based on SVD-based language-specific disentanglement of LoRA blocks and a local orthogonal tuning strategy to detect content anomalies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution is superior in multilingual content anomaly detection while reducing multilingual knowledge conflicts and communication rounds. |
PCR4ALL: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Pronoun Coreference Resolution in English (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing PCR systems are not reliable in real applications due to weak semantic meanings of pronouns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and toolbox that evaluates performance of PCR systems from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark and toolbox evaluates the performance of PCR systems from different perspectives. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
Execution as Verification: Fine-Grained Self-Correcting Reasoning for Complex KBQA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering methods are limited by syntactic constraints and are prone to structural deviations that render queries unexecutable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes semantic parsing as an iterative reasoning process driven by execution feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in query executability and answer accuracy on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets. |
Source Critical Reinforcement Learning for Transferring Spoken Language Understanding to a New Language (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | a study aims to develop a language transferring system to avoid the trouble of acquiring and labeling a new big SLU corpus . general-purpose translators cannot handle the lot of semantic labels, not to mention cultural differences . a RL-based language transfer method can be used to adapt the adapted translator to a target language . |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning to adapt a spoken language understanding model to a target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language transferring method improves domain classification accuracy by 22% compared with naive translation . the proposed language transfer method can be used on Chinese to English translators with more proper slot tags . |
MirrorCAPTCHA: Wild CAPTCHA, Wild Distribution, Wild Web-based Platform Meet Multimodal LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Wu, Yuwei Hu, Tianyu Cui, Yueying Tian, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yang Yang, Jianfeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks fail to evaluate an agent's real-world capacity to handle CAPTCHA . Existing benchmarks ignore this practical challenge, failing to evaluate agents' ability to handle complex visual CAPTchas. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark annotated with Weighted Pass Rate and a new metric to measure agent's ability to handle CAPTCHA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms current state-of-the-art closed-source models on mirrorCAPTCHA and achieves 9.4% higher average weighted pass rate and 2.13% higher average Completion degree. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Knowledge Enhancement and Filtering Framework (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge enhancement techniques for pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce noisy entity representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge enhancement filter that integrates external knowledge bases to enhance PLMs' ability to capture entity knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x. |
GKD: A General Knowledge Distillation Framework for Large-scale Pre-trained Language Model (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation frameworks for language models are limited by memory and the use of complex distillation methods on larger-scale PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a general knowledge distillation framework that supports distillation on larger-scale PLMs using various distillation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can support distillation on larger-scale PLMs and 25 mainstream methods on 8 NVIDIA A100 (40GB) GPUs. |
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing timeline summarizations lack flexibility to meet diverse granularity needs . a fine-grained timeline showing the technical details is preferred for news topics . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed timelines are informative and granularly consistent, but they struggle to generate consistent timelines. |
An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies evaluate VLP models by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance with the average downstream task accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolbox for evaluating Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolbox provides the preliminary datasets that deepen the image-texting ability of a VLP model. |
Demographics Should Not Be the Reason of Toxicity: Mitigating Discrimination in Text Classifications with Instance Weighting (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has found that text classification datasets contain certain unintended biases, such as text containing demographic identity-terms that are more likely to be abusive. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic debiasing framework that recovers the non-discrimination distribution using instance weighting, which does not require extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of demographic identity-terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates the unintended biases without hurting models’ generalization ability. |
Context-Aware Query Rewriting for Improving Users’ Search Experience on E-commerce Websites (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing query rewriting models ignore user history behaviors and consider only the instant search query, which is often a short string offering limited information about the true shopping intent. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end context-aware query rewriting model that takes search context into account and builds a session graph using the history search queries and their contained words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models under various metrics. |
CoreEval: Automatically Building Contamination-Resilient Datasets with Real-World Knowledge toward Reliable LLM Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Publicly available datasets can be used to evaluate performance of large language models . however, contamination of test data can artificially inflate model performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a Contamination-resilient Evaluation strategy that updates data with real-world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation strategy can be used to update datasets with real-world knowledge. |
Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning: Beyond Fixed Sparse Attention Patterns (2022.findings-acl)
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Zihan Wang, Jiuxiang Gu, Jason Kuen, Handong Zhao, Vlad Morariu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ani Nenkova, Tong Sun, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | Adaptive Axis Attention learns different attention patterns for each task and model layer . sparse attention patterns do not improve the run time of the models but they reduce model memory requirements . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns different attention patterns for each Transformer layer . they propose 'adaptive axis attention' method that identifies important tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not require pre-training to accommodate sparse attention patterns. |
LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoshi Pan, Qianhui Wu, Huiqiang Jiang, Menglin Xia, Xufang Luo, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Victor Rühle, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to compress prompts only leverage unidirectional context, causing suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompt compression method that takes tokens from context . they use a Transformer encoder to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods and faster than baselines. |
Takin-VC: Expressive Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Adaptive Hybrid Content Encoding and Enhanced Timbre Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Yuguang, Yu Pan, Jixun Yao, Xiang Zhang, Jianhao Ye, Hongbin Zhou, Lei Xie, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao
| Challenge: | Expressive zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to modify source timbre to match unseen speaker . existing zero- shot VC systems struggle to reproduce paralinguistic information in highly expressive speech . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for expressive zero-shot voice conversion that uses hybrid content encoding and memory-augmented context-aware timbre modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art VC systems in speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and speaker similarness. |
DFAMS: Dynamic-flow guided Federated Alignment based Multi-prototype Search (2026.acl-long)
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Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Ruiqing Li, Yihang Zhang, Yue Fang, Yongxin Xu, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ambiguous queries struggle to retrieve high-quality documents . DFAMS outperforms advanced FR methods by 14.37% in knowledge classification accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages dynamic information flow to identify latent query intents and construct semantically aligned knowledge partitions for accurate retrieval across heterogeneous sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in classification accuracy and retrieval recall tests. |
Enhancing Multiple-choice Machine Reading Comprehension by Punishing Illogical Interpretations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice MRC is one of the most studied tasks in MRC due to the convenience of evaluation and the flexibility of answer format. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple-choice MRC to explain a trained model and reveal how it arrives at the prediction by punishing illogical attributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance without external information and model structure change without any external information. |
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing models for Abductive Reasoning are limited in their ability to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language task that aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on the proposed dataset. |
Unlocking General Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Representation Engineering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work finds that long CoT reasoning can be efficiently elicited by tuning on only a few examples and can easily transfer to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation engineering method to unleash the general long CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. |
ATIR: Towards Audio-Text Interleaved Contextual Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent multimodal information retrieval research has focused on images, largely overlooking audio. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-text interleaved contextual retrieval task where queries can alternate between audio and text modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves over baselines. |
GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trick (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate human-like content, but they also pose a problem with generation diversity, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logits-Addition watermark and three variants that aim to enhance diversity to overcome generation diversity challenges. |
| Outcome: | The Logits-Addition watermark outperforms the Logits+Trick-based watermark in diversity tests and outperformed other decoding-based methods by 0.1 to 0.3. |
A Relation-Oriented Clustering Method for Open Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open relation extraction (OpenRE) are designed for predefined relations, which cannot deal with new emerging relations in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-oriented clustering model that leverages readily available labeled data to learn a relationship-oriented representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces error rate by 29.2% and 15.7% on two datasets compared with current SOTA methods. |
A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogues perform poorly when transfer into new domains with limited training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised three-stage learning framework based on weakly-supervised learning based upon large scale ungrounded dialogues and unstructured knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods even in zero-resource setting. |
MADRA: Multi-Agent Debate for Risk-Aware Embodied Planning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods, such as RLHF, fall into a Safety-Utility Trade-off, resulting in severe over-rejection of benign household instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive Critical Agent that evaluates peer debates using a structured argumentation framework derived from the Toulmin Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing systems in the SafeAware-VH benchmark. |
VHASR: A Multimodal Speech Recognition System With Vision Hotwords (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that incorporate audio-related image information do not improve speech recognition performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach utilizing audio-related image information and set up a multimodal speech recognition system that uses vision as hotwords to enhance the model’s speech recognition capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms unimodal ASR model and achieves SOTA among existing image-based multimodal ASL models. |
A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiuxiang Gu, Yifei Ming, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, Ani Nenkova
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-aware adapter to adapt transformer-based language models to document domain to exploit multi-modal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to using a standard language model and to competitive baselines. |
Incorporating Linguistic Constraints into Keyphrase Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase generation methods generate overlapping phrases (including sub-phrases or super-phrase) Existing methods are far from satisfactory for a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel Seq2Seq network with coverage attention to alleviate the overlapping phrase problem by integrating linguistic constraints of keyphrase into the basic Seq2-Sequeq network on the source side and employ the multi-task learning framework on the target side. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art CopyRNN on scientific datasets and is also more effective in news domain. |
Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been criticized for lack of integration of bilingual lexical information into the neural architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation models by introducing three new components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionary can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from source view and target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dicaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguators based on a hierarchical |
Refining Salience-Aware Sparse Fine-Tuning Strategies for Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models require expensive training on consumer-grade hardwares. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparsity-based approach that introduces trainable sparse adaptations to the weight matrices in the model and offers greater flexibility in selecting fine-tuned parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other methods for a simple yet effective baseline for nLP tasks while sacrificing performance. |
LOG: A Local-to-Global Optimization Approach for Retrieval-based Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering emphasize single-step and multi-step iterative decomposition or retrieval, which are susceptible to failure in long-chain reasoning due to the progressive accumulation of erroneous information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local-tO-Global optimized retrieval method to discover more beneficial information and improve tuplet objective loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models and significantly improves multi-hop reasoning. |
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. |
Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets under the question answering scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training algorithm generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. |
The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao, Lingqi Miao, Shimin Tao, Minggui HE, Chenxin Liu, Zhang Li, null Mahongxia, Jiaxin Guo, Chen Liu, Liqun Deng, Jiansheng Wei, Xiaojun Meng, Fanyi Du, Daimeng Wei, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual evaluation benchmarks neglect cultural nuances and lack language coverage in subjective tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that categorizes evaluation tasks into three cultural layers and nine cognitive sub-layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses prior coverage by up to 111% on 20+ LLMs. |
DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yiming Huang, Jianwen Luo, Yan Yu, Yitong Zhang, Fangyu Lei, Yifan Wei, Shizhu He, Lifu Huang, Xiao Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | DA-Code is a code generation benchmark designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a code generation benchmark specifically designed for LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark performs better than existing frameworks, but lacks accuracy . it is based on real-world data, and includes examples that cover a wide range of tasks . |
MRAG: A Modular Retrieval Framework for Time-Sensitive Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for answering time-sensitive questions lack temporal reasoning . existing methods struggle with these time-intensive questions, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-based question-answering framework that integrates temporal perturbations and gold evidence labels into a question processing framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline retrieval methods in retrieval performance. |
Stick to the Facts: Learning towards a Fidelity-oriented E-Commerce Product Description Generation (D19-1)
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Zhangming Chan, Xiuying Chen, Yongliang Wang, Juntao Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Kun Gai, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing models for product description generation do not take the product attribute information into account. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that takes the embedding and the entity label of each word into account . they establish a keyword memory that stores the entity labels as keys and keywords as values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the fidelity of the generated descriptions by 25%. |
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. |
Entity Concept-enhanced Few-shot Relation Extraction (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing FSRE methods fail to classify relations based on information of sentences and entity pairs due to limited samples and lack of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-sentence attention module to select the most appropriate concept from multiple concepts of each entity by calculating the semantic similarity between sentences and concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme outperforms existing methods on a few-shot relation extraction dataset. |
Pruning General Large Language Models into Customized Expert Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) require significant computational resources to maintain their general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Custom Pruning method to prune a large general model into a smaller lightweight expert model, positioned along the "language", "domain" and "task" dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing pruning methods and achieves minimal loss in both expert and general capabilities across models from different model families and sizes. |
From Chaotic OCR Words to Coherent Document: A Fine-to-Coarse Zoom-Out Network for Complex-Layout Document Image Translation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document Image Translation (DIT) aims to translate documents in images from one language to another. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel end-to-end network called Zoom-out DIT to improve document translation by combining word positioning, sentence recognition and document organization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network improves word positioning, sentence recognition and document organization, and improves translation quality. |
Enhancing Label Correlation Feedback in Multi-Label Text Classification via Multi-Task Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-task learning fail to capture label correlations . Existing methods suffer from label order dependency, label combination over-fitting and error propagation problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach with multi-task learning to enhance label correlation feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on AAPD and RCV1-V2 datasets. |
Distinguishing Non-natural from Natural Adversarial Samples for More Robust Pre-trained Language Model (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on adversarial attacks achieve high success rates against PrLMs, claiming that they are not robust. |
| Approach: | They propose to use anomaly detector to evaluate PrLMs with more natural adversarial samples to evaluate their robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to defend all types of attacks and achieve higher accuracy on adversarial samples and compliant samples than other defense frameworks. |
Mitigating Misleading Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Selective Filtering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning techniques to solve complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that assesses the entailment relationship between the question and the candidate reasoning chain and uses it to predict the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the fine-tuned T5 baseline over the ScienceQA, ECQA, and LastLetter tasks. |
AdaptFlow: Adaptive Workflow Optimization via Meta-Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Runchuan Zhu, Bowen Jiang, Lingrui Mei, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Haoxiang Gao, Fengshuo Bai, Pu Zhao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models rely on static templates or manual workflows. |
| Approach: | AdaptFlow is a language-based meta-learning framework inspired by model-agnostic meta- learning. |
| Outcome: | AdaptFlow outperforms manual and automated workflows on question answering, code generation and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
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. |
Relaxing the Constraints: A Dual-Importance Projection Mechanism for Lifelong Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghai Chen, Senbin Xu, Jiaxi Tan, Xinhua Wu, Yan Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Ke Li, Sicheng Zhao, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on strict orthogonal projection to preserve previously edited knowledge, but this constraint limits gradient expressiveness, resulting in degradation of model generalization and overall performance as the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify critical gradient subspaces and introduces a dual mechanism comprising "accumulated importance" and "projection importance" |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mainstream LLMs show that the proposed method achieves an average comprehensive performance improvement of 10.36% and effectively maintains the model’s general capabilities on downstream tasks. |
Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GUI agents are susceptible to environmental distractions. |
| Approach: | They propose a scenario where both user and agent are benign and environment is not malicious . they implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves faithfulness of multimodal large language model agents in a graphical user interface environment. |
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. |
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a learned dense retrieval model is often overlooked when using a corpus for inference, resulting in a design choice of retrieval unit . granularity of retrievals is important for both retrieval and downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval unit for dense retrieval that uses propositions to index corpus . propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval unit outperforms passage-level units on retrieval and downstream tasks. |
Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Memory-Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Zhihao Jia
| Challenge: | Existing methods to finetun large language models (LLMs) only update a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetune process. |
| Approach: | They propose quantized side tuing (QST) which quantizes an LLM’s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the original weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the memory footprint of the model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations while reducing the memory requirements. |
Learning to Extract Rational Evidence via Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is effective in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, retrieval noises undermine the quality of LLMs’ generation, necessitating the development of denoising mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which integrates reasoning and extracting into one unified trajectory, followed by knowledge token masking to avoid information leakage. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show the superiority of EviOmni, which provides compact and high-quality evidence, enhances the accuracy of downstream tasks, and supports both traditional and agentic RAG systems. |
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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Weijie Shi, Hao Chen, Jiaming Li, Yao Zhao, Yazhong Zhang, Qijin Chen, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks. |
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Rongjie Huang, Huadai Liu, Xize Cheng, Yi Ren, Linjun Li, Zhenhui Ye, Jinzheng He, Lichao Zhang, Jinglin Liu, Xiang Yin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for speech-to-speech translation suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based audio-visual speech-to-speech translation model that integrates visual information with audio-only data to improve system robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on audio-only corpus in two languages . it also improves with low-resource audio-visual data, compared with baselines . |
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
Stepwise Reasoning Disruption Attack of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao, Kai Zhang, Wanyu Wang, Pengyue Jia, Qidong Liu, Ruocheng Guo, Qi Liu
| Challenge: | Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or lack of imperceptibility, limiting their feasibility and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a stepwise rEasoning error disruption attack that subtly injects errors into prior reasoning steps to mislead the model into producing incorrect subsequent reasoning and final answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is compatible with zero-shot and few-shot settings, maintains the natural reasoning flow, and ensures covert execution without modification of the instruction. |
Using Context-to-Vector with Graph Retrofitting to Improve Word Embeddings (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Contextualized embeddings are expensive and resource-demanding, hence environmentally unfriendly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to convert contextualized embeddings from pre-trained models into static embeddables using synonym knowledge and weighted vector distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline embeddings by a large margin through extrinsic and intrinsic tasks. |
Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies of stance detection focus on learning stance information about specific targets from context, but in real-world scenarios, we usually have a certain understanding of a target when we express our stance on it. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the background knowledge of the target into account for better stance detection by categorizing it into episodic and discourse knowledge categories and a heuristic retrieval algorithm based on the topic to retrieve the Wikipedia documents relevant to the sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets showing that the proposed framework is able to detect stances in-target and zero-shot scenarios. |
Agent-FLAN: Designing Data and Methods of Effective Agent Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on prompt engineering or framework scheduling of one/multiple LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LLMs as agents into their training corpus by decomposition and redesigning the training corpu . they propose to use LLM-FLAN to effectively fine-tune LANguage models for Agents by reducing hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prior best models by 3.5% across agent evaluation datasets. |
ProtoCycle: Reflective Tool-Augmented Planning for Text-Guided Protein Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutang Ge, Guojiang Zhao, Sihang Li, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Hanchen Xia, Guolin Ke, Linfeng Zhang, Zhifeng Gao, Yu Guang Wang
| Challenge: | Recent deep generative models have already shown encouraging * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | Recent studies show that reflection improves sequence quality and alignment while maintaining competitive foldability. |
Bi-Directional Multi-Granularity Generation Framework for Knowledge Graph-to-Text with Large Language Model (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods generate whole text based on all KG triples at once and may incorporate incorrect KG Triples for each sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional multi-granularity generation framework that generates graph-level sentences based on KG triples instead of the whole text at a time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in benchmark dataset WebNLG and further analysis shows the efficiency of different modules. |
WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Code Large Language Models can address a wide range of code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate widespread and versatile instruction data from open source code datasets and use it to train code-related models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in generalization ability across code-related tasks. |
AdaNSP: Uncertainty-driven Adaptive Decoding in Neural Semantic Parsing (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing (SP) maps a natural language utterance into a formal language . standard Seq2Seq models ignore underlying grammars and may give ill-formed results. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model for semantic parsing that transduces a natural language sentence to the formal semantic representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models and does not need expertise like predefined grammar or sketches in the meantime. |
ABSEval: An Agent-based Framework for Script Evaluation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on script evaluation of large language models (LLMs) have not evaluated scripts generated by LLMs due to their logical structure, sequential organization, and open-ended nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a script evaluation dataset to evaluate LLM scripts . they propose to develop an agent-based script evaluation framework ABSEval to evaluate scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides superior accuracy and relevance, aligning closely with human evaluation. |
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining. |
Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current AST methods struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that converts singing recordings into note sequences for automatic annotation of singing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets. |
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments. |
Incorporating Object-Level Visual Context for Multimodal Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-grained entity typing is superior to text-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called fine-grained entity typing to classify entities . they propose combining textual and visual contexts to capture fine-granular semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior classification performance compared to previous text-based approaches. |
Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Luoyang Sun, Guangyan Li, Cheng Deng, Haifeng Zhang, Jian Zhao, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment bottlenecks due to computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that exploits activation and weight sparsity . they use a three-tier routing strategy that uses magnitude-based pruning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Llama and Mistral models show that DAWS outperforms activation-weight sparsity pruning methods. |
A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases (KBs) can explicitly facilitate the QA process. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical reasoning model pretraining NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals, to enhance numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Sharper and Faster mean Better: Towards More Efficient Vision-Language Model for Hour-scale Long Video Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on the video understanding task, but extremely long videos still pose significant challenges to their context length, memory consumption, and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model named Sophia for long video understanding which can efficiently handle hour-scale long videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits competitive performance compared to existing video understanding baselines across various benchmarks for long video understanding with reduced time and memory consumption. |
Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results prove that language models can learn from human feedback better, irrespective of sequence length . emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length by using the Product-of-Experts technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows that language models perform better regardless of sequence length . the main expert is focused on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. |
TEXTOIR: An Integrated and Visualized Platform for Text Open Intent Recognition (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . currently, many dialogue systems are limited to handle the uncertain open intents . |
| Approach: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . it is composed of two main modules: open intent detection and open intent discovery . authors propose a framework to implement a complete process to identify known intents and discover open intents . |
| Outcome: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated and visualized platform for text open intent recognition . it integrates state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmark intent datasets . however, there are still some issues, which bring difficulties for future research . |
Subword-augmented Embedding for Cloze Reading Comprehension (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension use word and character representations, but character is not the minimal unit. |
| Approach: | They propose to use subword rather than character for word embedding enhancement . they also empirically explore different augmentation strategies on subword-augmented embedded embedders . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on public datasets. |
M2RC-EVAL: Massively Multilingual Repository-level Code Completion Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaheng Liu, Ken Deng, Congnan Liu, Jian Yang, Shukai Liu, He Zhu, Peng Zhao, Linzheng Chai, Yanan Wu, JinKe JinKe, Ge Zhang, Zekun Moore Wang, Guoan Zhang, Yingshui Tan, Bangyu Xiang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing repository-level code completion benchmarks focus on a limited number of languages . existing benchmarks report overall average scores of different languages ignoring fine-grained abilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use repository-level code completion benchmarks to evaluate general code intelligence abilities across languages for existing code Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks improve the code completion abilities of existing LLMs by using two types of annotations on the parsed syntax tree. |
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). |
Visually-augmented pretrained language models for NLP tasks without images (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve pre-trained language models lack visual commonsense and semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-augmented approach to fine-tune pre-trained language models by using retrieved or generated images instead of relying on explicit images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on ten tasks and consistently outperformed other approaches. |
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. |
ARCQuant: Boosting NVFP4 Quantization with Augmented Residual Channels for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | NVFP4 supports fine-grained block isolation, 4-bit quantization errors and mixed-precision approaches . ARCQuant boosts NVFO4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels. |
| Outcome: | ARCQuant boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels . the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy comparable to full-precision baselines compared to FP16 . |
Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model development, protecting the model’s parameters and training data has become an urgent and crucial concern. |
| Approach: | They define "reverse engineering" techniques as attacks on large language models and provide an in-depth analysis of them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks are described as “reverse engineering” techniques on LMs and provide an introduction to existing protective strategies. |
Federated Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition via Distilling with Heterogeneous Tag Sets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a federated domain adaptation approach is used to learn with NER datasets from multiple platforms while not violating data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a distillation approach to facilitate knowledge transfer across platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in the clinic domain. |
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 . |
Open Vocabulary Learning for Neural Chinese Pinyin IME (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Pinyin-to-character conversion is the core component of pinyin based Chinese input method engine (IME). |
| Approach: | They propose a neural P2C conversion model augmented by an online updated vocabulary to support open vocabulary learning during IME working. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms commercial IMEs and state-of-the-art models on standard corpus and true inputting history dataset in terms of multiple metrics and the online updated vocabulary helps it follow user inputting behavior. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
GraphNarrator: Generating Textual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graph representation learning has garnered significant attention due to its broad applications in various domains, such as recommendation systems and social network analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a generative language model to map input-output pairs to explanations reflecting the model’s decision-making process to generate a model that generates pseudo-labels that capture the model's decisions from saliency-based explanations. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GraphNarrator produces human-preferred explanations that are faithful, concise, and human-like. |
Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Yiwen Ding, Zifei Shan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | a new method for generating chart annotations is proposed to improve visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-as-intermediary translation method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective, efficient and scalable. |
Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a task of assigning entity mentions to referent entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ultra-fine-grained type information to improve the generalization ability of EL models by utilizing a low-level task to extract ultra-finish entity type information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the zero-shot entity linking task . |
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. |
GLaPE: Gold Label-agnostic Prompt Evaluation for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored leveraging the LLM itself as an optimizer to identify optimal prompts that maximize task accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a gold label-agnostic prompt evaluation method to reduce dependence on gold labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more effective prompts even without gold labels. |
Graph-Assisted Large Language Models: A Perspective on Mitigating Intrinsic Limitations (2026.findings-acl)
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Haitong Luo, Fali Wang, Weiyao Zhang, Xianren Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Tianxiang Zhao, Minhua Lin, Jiahao Zhang, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Qi He, Suhang Wang, Xuying Meng, Yujun Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit intrinsic limitations such as knowledge cutoff, single-threaded reasoning that hinders finer-grained branch and aggregation, and rigid collaboration mechanisms that struggle to coordinate specialized capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy spanning *Graph-Assisted Knowledge Augmentation*, *Graph Assisted Reasoning and Planning*, and *Graphed LLM Collaboration*. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that graphs can augment and correct LLMs and support dynamic coordination among experts and agents in collaborative settings. |
UNIVID: Unified Vision-Language Model for Video Moderation (2026.acl-industry)
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Kejuan Yang, Yizhuo Zhang, Mingyuan Du, Yue Zhang, Dixin Zheng, Kaili Zhao, Yang Xiao, Hanzhong Liang, Kenan Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing video moderation systems rely on fragmented black-box classification models that are difficult to maintain and lack transparency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Unified Vision-Language model for Video Moderation that generates policy-aware captions that serve as an interpretable intermediate representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces violation leakage and overkill rate by 42.7% while reducing maintenance costs. |
GoT-R1: Internalizing Graph-of-Thought via Structural Reinforcement for High-Density Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning suffers from an inherent mechanism flaw: linearity induces overthinking . emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally redefined artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces verbose linear trajectories with high-density reasoning graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models with reduced token overhead. |
Easy Guided Decoding in Providing Suggestions for Interactive Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In order to improve translation efficiency, human translators perform post-editing on machine translations to correct errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the parameterized objective function of neural machine translation to deal with the TS problem without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality by 10.6 BLEU and reduces time overhead by 63.4% on benchmark datasets. |
Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods do not provide fine-grained supervision for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning method that incorporates a generative model as the reward model and a token-level supervision model for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 8 tasks show the proposed method is effective . |
Thinking Beyond the Local: Multi-View Instructed Adaptive Reasoning in KG-Enhanced LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models adopt query-driven iterative reasoning from a local perspective, limiting efficiency and accuracy for complex multi-hop tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view instructed adaptive reasoning of LLM on Knowledge Graphs that allows LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes the limitations of local exploration by enabling LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 to address the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA by reconstructing tables into tuples and using prompt templates to create dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous work on complex table parsing datasets and leads to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. |
Signer Diversity-driven Data Augmentation for Signer-Independent Sign Language Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sign language translation (SLT) rely on signer identity labels, which is often impractical and costly in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a signer diversity-driven data augmentation method that can generalize to signers not encountered during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results without relying on signer identity labels. |
Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Guanyu Chen, Peiyang Wang, Yizhou Jiang, Yuqian Liu, Chujie Zhao, Ying Fang, Tianren Zhang, Feng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing large language models can perform abstract reasoning tasks but are they actually engaging in rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to examine whether large language models perform abstract reasoning . they fine-tune the model to learn those contradictory rules and assess its generalization ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach examines whether large language models perform abstract reasoning by altering their original understanding of fundamental rules. |
AI4Reading: Chinese Audiobook Interpretation System Based on Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Interpretative audiobooks are becoming more popular, but their manual creation process remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration system that leverages large language models and speech synthesis technology to generate podcast-like audiobook interpretations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is open source and open to the public. |
Minimal, Local, and Robust: Embedding-Only Edits for Implicit Bias in T2I Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | EmbEdit is a text-to-image editing method that only fine-tunes the word token embedding (WTE) of the target object. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to edit implicit assumptions and priors in text-to-image models without affecting unrelated objects or degrading overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods in various models, tasks, and editing scenarios. |
Generative Calibration for In-context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is one of the most exciting features of large language models . performance is sensitive to various configurations of the prompt, such as the choice or order of the training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to calibrate the in-context predictive distribution by adjusting the label marginal . they find that the proposed method outperforms the ICL and state-of-the-art calibration methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 27% absolute in macro-F1. |
ProMed: Shapley Information Gain Guided Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Medical LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Hongxin Ding, Baixiang Huang, Yue Fang, Weibin Liao, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yinghao Zhu, Zheng Li, Liantao Ma, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing medical Large Language Models (LLMs) follow a reactive paradigm, risking diagnostic errors by answering before seeking sufficient details. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that transitions LLMs toward a proactive paradigm, enabling them to ask clinically valuable questions before decision-making. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on partial-information medical benchmarks show that ProMed outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.29% on average and delivers a 54.45% gain over the reactive paradigm. |
Data-Efficiently Learn Large Language Model for Universal 3D Scene Perception (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for 3D scene understanding are limited to specific downstream tasks, hindering their practicality in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D visual perceptual ability and advanced reasoning capabilities for 3D scenes by aligning 3D representations into the feature space of advanced LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves a 82.2% relative score compared with state-of-the-art methods with limited data. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
cAST: Enhancing Code Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structural Chunking via Abstract Syntax Tree (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing line-based chunking heuristics often break semantic structures, splitting functions or merging unrelated code. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware method that breaks large AST nodes into smaller chunks . this method generates self-contained, semantically coherent units across programming languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts Recall@5 by 4.3 points on RepoEval retrieval and Pass@1 by 2.67 points on SWE-bench generation. |
Segment First or Comprehend First? Explore the Limit of Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to measure word segmentation only assess the language model's understanding of the overall meaning of sentences, lacking an evaluation of the language models' understanding capabilities at a fine-grained level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explore the limit of unsupervised word segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) they employ current mainstream LLMs to perform word segmentations across multiple languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods and combines the advanced pattern recognition capabilities of Aho-Corasick automata with the deep insights of well-pretrained LLMs. |
EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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Wei Tang, Yixin Cao, Yang Deng, Jiahao Ying, Bo Wang, Yizhe Yang, Yuyue Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yong Liao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge evolution benchmarks are static and fail to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolving dataset that categorizes information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is auto-updatable and enables evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs. |
Generating Visual Spatial Description via Holistic 3D Scene Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing VSD work focuses on skewed spatial understanding of target objects . Existing work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features . |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate 3D scene features into visual spatial description tasks by sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two VSD datasets and produces more spatially-diversified generation. |
Multi-split Reversible Transformers Can Enhance Neural Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale transformers have been shown to improve neural machine translation performance but training these wider and deeper networks could be extremely memory intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-split based reversible transformer and a backpropagation algorithm that does not need to store activations for most layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the vanilla transformer by at least 1.4 BLEU points in three datasets. |
SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for retrieval-augmented reasoning on numerical sports questions focus on one or two evidence units. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented reasoning on numerical sports questions . they evaluate existing retrievers and rerankers, along with agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks focus on the sports domain because it offers rich multi-modal resources. |
A Span-based Multimodal Variational Autoencoder for Semi-supervised Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition on social media are not efficient for semi-supervised MNER because of the mismatch between the posted text and image. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to fuse the text and image features for multimodal named entity recognition under semi-supervised setting by exploiting modal-specific VAEs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines under supervised setting and improves performance with less labeled data than existing semi-supervised methods. |
Tree-Instruct: A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the importance of data complexity as a crucial metric, but the impact of complexity remains relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to add a specified number of nodes to instructions’ semantic trees to enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms diverse yet complex instructions under the same token budget and can control the difficulty level of modified instructions. |
Benchmarking LLMs for Translating Classical Chinese Poetry: Evaluating Adequacy, Fluency, and Elegance (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models fall short of translating culturally significant content . existing models fall behind in achieving such translations, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a suitable benchmark for translating classical Chinese poetry into English . they propose RAT, a retrieval-augmented machine translation method that enhances the translation process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality in terms of adequate, fluent, and elegant translations. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocal and Accompaniment (2024.acl-long)
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Zhiqing Hong, Rongjie Huang, Xize Cheng, Yongqi Wang, Ruiqi Li, Fuming You, Zhou Zhao, Zhimeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on singing voice synthesis and music generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task called Text-to-Song synthesis which incorporates both vocal and accompaniment generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can synthesize songs with comparable quality and style consistency. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
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Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang
| 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. |
The Stackelberg Speaker: Optimizing Persuasive Communication in Social Deduction Games (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on information processing and strategy selection, overlooking the significance of persuasive communication in social deduction games. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that trains agents to optimize influential utterances for persuasive impact by formalizing turn-based dialogue as a Stackelberg competition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across four social deduction benchmarks and shows that it is effective in persuasive communication. |
Empower Large Language Model to Perform Better on Industrial Domain-Specific Question Answering (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Zezhong Wang, Lu Wang, Bo Qiao, Jue Zhang, Mohit Garg, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity but lack specific domain knowledge in domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model interaction paradigm that empowers LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods in domain-specific tasks. |
Logic Traps in Evaluating Attribution Scores (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Modern deep learning models are notoriously opaque, which has motivated the development of methods for interpreting how deep models predict. |
| Approach: | They propose to review existing methods for evaluating attribution scores and summarize the logic traps in these methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that they do not contain logic traps and that they are not reliable. |
Embedding and Gradient Say Wrong: A White-Box Method for Hallucination Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection have attracted more attention from the community. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the distributional distance between the regular conditional output and the unconditional output, which is generated without a given input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the hallucination benchmarks HADES and other datasets. |
Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words (2022.coling-1)
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Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Nuwa Xi, Sendong Zhao, Meizhi Ju, Shiwei Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models perform poorly with limited data and rare biomedical words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt to fine-tune pre-trained models for biomedical domain tuning with a simple approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings. |
Semi-Supervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Two-way Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semisupervised methods do not fully utilize the knowledge hidden in annotated and nonannotated data, which hinders further improvement of their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised BLI framework to encourage interaction between supervised signal and unsupervised alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can incorporate any supervised and unsupervised BLI methods based on optimal transport and bi-directional lexicon update. |
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucination detection rely heavily on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework called HaluAgent that integrates LLMs, multi-functional toolbox and a memory mechanism for hallucination detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and can detect hallucinations on Chinese and English datasets. |
Multi-perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Xian Wu, Zhihong Zhu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a widely used method to tackle incompleteness in knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework to compensate for the deficiency of contextualized knowledge by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves knowledge graph completion (KGC) by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
A Comparative Study of Explicit and Implicit Gender Biases in Large Language Models via Self-evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the explicit and implicit biases in large language models (LLMs) focus on either explicit or implicit bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evaluation-based two-stage measurement of explicit and implicit biases within large language models grounded in social psychology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two stages of self-evaluation on state-of-the-art LLMs to measure explicit bias toward social targets, where bias is less likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. |
SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Xun Liang, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li, Sensen Zhang, Hanyu Wang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhaoxin Fan, Bo Tang, Jihao Zhao, Jiawei Yang, Shichao Song, Mengwei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) however, the incorporation of external knowledge increases the vulnerability of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the RAG security using a dataset . they classify attack tasks into silver noise, inter-context conflict, soft ad, and white Denial-of-Service . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the security of RAG against 14 representative RAG components. |
E3-TIR: Enhanced Experience Exploitation for Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from inefficient exploration and mode degradation due to a lack of prior guidance, while SFT-then-RL is limited by high data costs and capability plateaus caused by low-entropy collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose an Enhanced Experience Exploitation paradigm that integrates expert prefixes, expert guided, and self-exploration to improve agent training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 6% performance improvement over traditional paradigms on tool-use tasks while requiring less than 10% of the synthetic data. |
Lingke: a Fine-grained Multi-turn Chatbot for Customer Service (C18-2)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce chatbots usually need a mass of human dialogue data to train, but for multi-turn conversations, the performance is poor. |
| Approach: | They propose an information retrieval augmented multi-turn chatbot which can answer questions based on unstructured documents and deal with multi-turned conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution outperforms all other models in multi-turn conversations and can learn from conversation records. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
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. |
DPF-CM: A Data Processing Framework with Privacy-Preserving Vector Databases for Chinese Medical LLMs Training and Deployment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for training data processing for Chinese medical language models is proposed . experimental results show that the framework significantly improves model accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a data processing framework for Chinese medical language models training and deployment . the framework is based on a question-oriented model training strategy and privacy preservation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves model accuracy and reduces privacy leakage by 27%. |
SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) ignore potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfers simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module to align the PET learning and selection modules to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two CL benchmarks show that the proposed framework is superior when scaled to different model sizes, different model architectures and unseen tasks. |
Better Late Than Never: Model-Agnostic Hallucination Post-Processing Framework Towards Clinical Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating concise and coherent summaries may include unintended text with hallucinations, causing computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework to post-process medical hallucinations . MEDAL integrates with any medical summarization model, requiring no additional computational overhead . |
| Outcome: | MEDAL can post-process medical hallucinations without additional computational overhead. |
MASTER: A Multi-Agent System with LLM Specialized MCTS (2025.naacl-long)
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Bingzheng Gan, Yufan Zhao, Tianyi Zhang, Jing Huang, Li Yusu, Shu Xian Teo, Changwang Zhang, Wei Shi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for problem-solving tasks . their strategic planning capability is often viewed with skepticism due to their limited planning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that coordinates agent recruitment and communication through LLM specialized MCTS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 76% accuracy on HotpotQA and 80% on WebShop . it relies on extensive sampling simulations to approximate the true reward distribution . |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |
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. |
MEGen: Generative Backdoor into Large Language Models via Model Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models are limited to yes-or-no discriminative tasks, leading users to underestimate the potential risks. |
| Approach: | They propose an editing-based generative backdoor that expands the backdoor to generative tasks in a unified format of any text-to-any text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high attack success rate by adjusting only a small set of local parameters with few-shot samples. |
Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chenyu Shi, Xiao Wang, Qiming Ge, Songyang Gao, Xianjun Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Xun Zhao, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted a tendency among large language models to refuse to answer benign queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach to reduce excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and a method to decode the next-token predictions by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the refusal rate by 20% while having little impact on safety. |
OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Zicheng Zhang, Haian Huang, Maosongcao Maosongcao, Jiaqi Wang, Weiyun Wang, Xinyu Fang, Wenhai Wang, Guangtao Zhai, Hua Yang, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) focus on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs’ alignment with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of 200K high-quality training samples improves human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks. |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |
CoViPAL: Layer-wise Contextualized Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to prune redundant vision tokens struggle in shallow layers due to the lack of contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise contextualized visual token pruning method that uses a plug-and-play Pruning Module to prune redundant vision tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms training-free pruning methods under equal token budgets and surpasses training based methods with comparable supervision. |
KV-Latent: Dimensional-level KV Cache Reduction with Frequency-aware Rotary Positional Embedding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer Decoders have become the preferred choice for conversational generative AI. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm called KV-Latent to reduce the KV cache footprint and improve inference speed by down-sampling the Key-Value vector dimensions into a latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reduces the KV Cache footprint and improves inference speed with a small amount of extra training, less than 1% of pre-training takes. |
DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating deep research capabilities rely on static datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated evaluation framework that pushes DR agents to their capability limits through dynamic investigation. |
| Outcome: | DR-Arena achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.94 with the LMSYS Search Arena leaderboard. |
ChildEval:WHEN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS MEET CHILDREN’S PERSONALITIES (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in effectively understanding and generating human language, leading to a revolutionary era in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to infer and follow child-centered preferences in long-context conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans five top-level and fourteen sub-level categories covering children’s daily lives and development. |
Adaptive Learning of Local Semantic and Global Structure Representations for Text Classification (C18-1)
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Jianyu Zhao, Zhiqiang Zhan, Qichuan Yang, Yang Zhang, Changjian Hu, Zhensheng Li, Liuxin Zhang, Zhiqiang He
| Challenge: | Existing representation models for text classification learn little structure information or rely on pre-defined structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a sandwich neural network to learn local semantic and global structure representations without relying on parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves competitive performance on several text classification tasks. |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuchong Sun, Che Liu, Kun Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Ruihua Song, Xin Zhao, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. |
Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on explanation stability under real user noise are limited . decoder LLMs produce significantly more stable explanations than encoder baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box robustness evaluation framework for token-level explanations based on leave-one-out occlusion . they propose to operationalize explanation robustness with top-token flip rate under realistic perturbations at multiple severity levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is compared with baseline models and encoder and decoder families. |
Empower Nested Boolean Logic via Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new self-supervised learning method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning method to empower language models with boolean logic . they augment training data with nested booles and program training from simpler to harder ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic, which can hardly be learned through naive training. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |
Memory-augmented Query Reconstruction for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that confuse tool utilization with knowledge reasoning harm readability and give rise to tool invocation hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple LLM from tool invocation tasks by establishing a memory module with explicit descriptions of query statements and a query memory module to facilitate the KGQA process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on WebQSP and CWQ benchmarks. |
NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries (2024.findings-eacl)
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Wei Zhao, Zhitao Hou, Siyuan Wu, Yan Gao, Haoyu Dong, Yao Wan, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Haidong Zhang
| Challenge: | Creating spreadsheet formulas remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users . a novel task is proposed to generate spreadsheet formulae from a user's NL query . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table given a Natural Language query as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a natural language query as input. |
Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training (2026.acl-long)
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Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jingxuan Xing, Yue Cao, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ziming Wang, Yingxiu Zhao, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
Prosody-TTS: Improving Prosody with Masked Autoencoder and Conditional Diffusion Model For Expressive Text-to-Speech (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Expressive text-to-speech aims to generate high-quality samples with rich prosody . prosodic attributes in highly dynamic voices are difficult to capture and model without intonation . |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that enhances prosody modeling and sampling by introducing a self-supervised masked autoencoder and a diffusion model to sample diverse prosodic patterns within the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves new state-of-the-art in text-to-speech with natural and expressive synthesis. |
Representative Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning with Two-Stage Determinantal Point Process (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods tend to select different demonstrations for each test instance, which is time-consuming and poses limitations in practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to select a representative subset of in-context demonstrations that can prompt different test instances in a specific task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to generate representative in-context demonstrations. |
T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step (2024.acl-long)
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Zehui Chen, Weihua Du, Wenwei Zhang, Kuikun Liu, Jiangning Liu, Miao Zheng, Jingming Zhuo, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing studies evaluate the tool utilization ability of large language models based on the final output or only consider the single-step tool calling. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to evaluate the tool utilization capability of large language models (LLMs) they decompose the tool usage into multiple sub-processes, including instruction following, planning, reasoning, retrieval, understanding, and review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits consistency with the outcome-oriented evaluation and provides a more fine-grained analysis of the capabilities of LLMs. |
Discriminating between Similar Languages on Imbalanced Conversational Texts (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results suggest that our system achieves an accuracy of 95.7% on our Uyghur and Kazakh dataset, which is higher than that of the CNN classifier. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a balanced Uyghur and Kazakh corpus and build morphological classifiers to discriminate between the two languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the champions on both test sets B1 and B2. |
RLShield: Dynamic Jailbreak Detection for LLMs via Reinforced Adaptive Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect jailbreak prompts rely on static model components or fixed decision thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic jailbreak detection framework that employs reinforcement learning for adaptive threshold selection. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the framework outperforms baselines in detection performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. |
Steering LLM Thinking with Budget Guidance (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing budget control methods for large language models are inadequate for long reasoning . budget guidance can be used to control reasoning length without fine-tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose a budget guidance method that models a Gamma distribution over remaining thinking length during next-token generation and uses it to guide generation in a soft, token-level manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 26% accuracy gain on the MATH-500 benchmark compared to baseline methods while maintaining competitive accuracy with only 63% of the thinking tokens used by the full-thinking model. |
PAR: Training-Free Positional Perturbation and Attention Recycling for Faithful OCR (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In high-precision tasks, vision language models suffer from Linguistic Priors Hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, inference-time intervention framework to mitigate this by integrating visual encoders with Large Language Model decoders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucination rates by 12% in long-context scenarios while maintaining robust generalization on standard benchmarks. |
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. |