Papers by Zheng Huang
Bridge Video and Text with Cascade Syntactic Structure (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using LSTM-CSS, we construct basic syntactic structure by completing syntastic structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a video captioning approach that progressively completes syntactic structure by a conditional random field to construct basic syntaktic structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces natural sentences with 42.3% and 28.5% accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
SATER: A Self-Aware and Token-Efficient Approach to Routing and Cascading (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, yet their effectiveness often depends on costly commercial APIs or cloud services. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-mode compatible approach that fine-tunes models through shortest-response preference optimization and a confidence-aware rejection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces redundant outputs and response times while reducing computational costs by over 50% and cascade latency by over 80%. |
Optimizing Code Retrieval: High-Quality and Scalable Dataset Annotation through Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for code retrieval struggle to balance scalability and annotation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates functions called within the repository and information on third-party APIs to enhance the annotation context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the annotation context by incorporating functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities. |
Butterfly Effects in Toolchains: A Comprehensive Analysis of Failed Parameter Filling in LLM Tool-Agent Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | emergence of tool agent paradigm has broadened capability boundaries of the Large Language Model (LLM) but effectiveness of tool agents limited due to parameter failure during execution . |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter failure taxonomy to investigate parameter failure . they propose suggestions for standardizing tool return formats and improving error feedback mechanisms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a tool agent invocation chain and a mainstream tool agent . it shows that parameter name hallucination failure stems from inherent limitations . |
From Isolated Scoring to Collaborative Ranking: A Comparison-Native Framework for LLM-Based Paper Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Pujun Zheng, Jiacheng Yao, Jinquan Zheng, Chenyang Gu, Guoxiu He, Jiawei Liu, Yong Huang, Tianrui Guo, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are currently used to evaluate scientific papers by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a comparison-native framework for paper evaluation that integrates comparison into both data construction and model learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average relative improvement of 21.8% over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets. |
Text Diffusion Model with Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Sequence-to-Sequence Generation (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing diffusion models are applied to continuous feature space while texts are sequences of discrete categorical tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture to approach sequence-to-sequence text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on five sequence-to-sequence generation tasks compared to other diffusion-based models regarding text quality and inference time. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
Improving End-to-End Speech Processing by Efficient Text Data Utilization with Latent Synthesis (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Latent Synthesis is an efficient textual data utilization framework for end-to-end speech processing models . labeled speech data are scarcer and more expensive for collection compared to textual ones . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual data utilization framework for E2E speech processing models . they train a latent synthesizer to convert textual information into an intermediate latent representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on low-resource speech recognition and spoken language understanding tasks. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
TripTailor: A Real-World Benchmark for Personalized Travel Planning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for travel planning rely on unrealistic simulated data . fewer than 10% of the itineraries generated by the latest state-of-the-art LLMs achieve human-level performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for personalized travel planning in real-world scenarios . they identify several critical challenges in travel planning including feasibility and rationality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that fewer than 10% of the itineraries generated by the latest state-of-the-art LLMs achieve human-level performance. |
Thoughts to Target: Enhance Planning for Target-driven Conversation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the planning ability of LLMs, especially in target-driven conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework to improve the LLMs’ capability in planning conversations towards designated targets by distilling natural language plans from a target-driven conversation corpus and generating new plans with demonstration-guided in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability of conversational models to plan towards designated targets and can be used to build extensive conversational AI. |
Cross-Lingual Phrase Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual phrase retrieval learn word or sentence representations in word or sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual phrase retrieval model that extracts phrase representations from unlabeled example sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale cross-lingual phrase retrieval dataset, showing it can perform in an unseen language pair during training. |
XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zewen Chi, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Bo Zheng, Saksham Singhal, Payal Bajaj, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | ELECTRA-style tasks are used to pretrain cross-lingual models for NLP tasks . masked language modeling tasks require massive computation resources, rendering such models quite expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ELECTRA-style tasks to pre-train a cross-lingual language model . they propose to pretrain the model on multilingual and parallel corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cross-lingual understanding tasks with much less computation cost. |
Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-document event coreference resolution are prone to learning simple co-occurrences due to the complexity of contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative approach to cross-document event coreference resolution that leverages both a universally capable LLM and a task-specific SLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses the performance of both large and small language models individually, underscoring its effectiveness in diverse scenarios. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Approach: | They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
Experience-driven Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengxi Lu, Jiabo Ye, Fei Tang, Yongliang Shen, Haiyang Xu, Ziwei Zheng, Weiming Lu, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions . training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to limited rewards and prohibitive costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains over the base model with 1K public trajectories as RL experiences . it achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o . |
Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to debiase samples with biased features obstructs the model in learning from non-biased parts of the samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to eliminate spurious correlations in a fine-grained manner from a feature space perspective by using Random Fourier Features and weighted re-sampling to decorrelate dependencies between features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates spurious correlations in a fine-grained manner from a feature space perspective. |
Enhancing Model Privacy in Federated Learning with Random Masking and Quantization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhibo Xu, Zhu JianHao, Jingwen Xu, Changze Lv, Zhenghua Wang, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Qi Qian, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | federated learning approaches are limited by the complexity of large language models and the need for specialized expertise to protect intellectual property. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning approach that leverages random masking to obscure a subnetwork of model parameters and applies quantization to the remaining parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains strong model performance in federated learning settings and achieves enhanced protection of model parameters compared to baseline methods. |
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Extractive Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models capture cross-sentence relations with recurrent neural networks, but they are hard to capture sentence-level long-distance dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based neural network for extractive summarization which contains semantic nodes apart from sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based neural network is the first to incorporate different types of nodes into it and perform a qualitative analysis. |
Budget-Constrained Tool Learning with Planning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for budget-constrained tool learning have been overlooked . et al., 2023b) compared tool learning with other methods to improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for budget-constrained tool learning by creating a preferable plan under the budget constraint before utilizing the tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the cost of tool learning and reaches competitive Pass Rate. |
Conversation Disentanglement with Bi-Level Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on pairwise utterance relations but pay inadequate attention to utterant-to-context relation modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a general disentangle model based on bi-level contrastive learning that brings closer utterances in the same session while encouraging each utterrance to be near its clustered session prototypes in representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both settings across public datasets. |
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Spiral of Silence in Large Language Model Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance . |
Towards Context-Aware Code Comment Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for code comments generate comments manually, but they suffer from poor scalability and high maintenance cost due to the expensive overhead of writing comment templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically generate code comments at a function level by targeting object-oriented programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is comparable with existing methods. |
A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Authorship attribution relies on manual features and fails to capture long-range correlations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Bayesian methods to calculate the probability that a text entails previous writings of an author. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 85% accuracy on the IMDb and blog datasets. |
Attn-GS: Attention-Guided Context Compression for Efficient Personalized LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Tianqi Zheng, Chuan Tian, Dante Everaert, Yau-Shian Wang, Yupin Huang, Michael J. Morais, Rohit Patki, Jinjin Tian, Xinnan Dai, Kai Guo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalize large language models (LLMs) rely on heuristic methods to compress user profiles but they ignore how LLMs process and prioritize different profile components. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention-guided context compression framework that leverages attention feedback from a marking model to mark important personalization sentences and guides a compression model to generate task-relevant compressed user contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across tasks, token limits, and settings while reducing token usage by 50 times. |
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases . a single-domain task evaluates the performance on identical databases based on the same domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-domain text-to-SQL task that parses user questions into SQL on unseen databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases. |
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Binghai Wang, Senjie Jin, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Zhihao Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences. |
pyvene: A Library for Understanding and Improving PyTorch Models via Interventions (2024.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengxuan Wu, Atticus Geiger, Aryaman Arora, Jing Huang, Zheng Wang, Noah Goodman, Christopher Manning, Christopher Potts
| Challenge: | Existing libraries are often project-based, but pyvene provides a unified and extensible framework for performing interventions on neural models and sharing the intervened upon models with others. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source Python library that supports customizable interventions on a range of different PyTorch modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a unified and extensible framework for performing interventions on neural models and sharing the intervened upon models with others. |
DKME: Rethinking Coupled Knowledge Memory for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing memory-based editors suffer from catastrophic forgetting as edits accumulate. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which injects factual updates into large language models without retraining or finetuning into existing memory-based editors. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HalluEditBench, CKnowEdit, and WikiDatacounterfact show that the proposed model achieves a more favorable trade-off between editing success and locality compared to baselines while maintaining more stable performance as the edit scale increases. |
Layer-wise Fusion with Modality Independence Modeling for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jun Sun, Shoukang Han, Yu-Ping Ruan, Xiaoning Zhang, Shu-Kai Zheng, Yulong Liu, Yuxin Huang, Taihao Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on developing models that exploit the unification of multiple modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to maintain modality independence by using a multi-modal transformer model that fuses all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in multi-modal emotion recognition. |
Simpler and Faster Learning of Adaptive Policies for Simultaneous Translation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on simultaneous translation is difficult because of its latency and quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised-learning framework to learn adaptive policies from parallel text sequences . they use a model that predicts when a target word is read or WRITE if context provides enough information . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on German=>English show that the proposed method can learn flexible policies with better BLEU scores and similar latencies compared to previous work. |
Governance in Motion: Co-evolution of Constitutions and AI models for Scalable Safety (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhao Huang, Ziyu Shen, Yicong Ren, Huiyuan Zheng, Jiazheng Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ming Zhang, Shihan Dou, Fan Mo, Jie Shi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences lack flexibility . static alignment preferences lack the ability to correct misaligned behaviors as they emerge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables dynamic and continuous alignment of large language models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves safety and accuracy of a 7B model with human annotations. |
Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages . however, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves cross-lingual model pre-training while reducing side effects of increasing vocabulary size. |
HDiff: Confidence-Guided Denoising Diffusion for Robust Hyper-relational Link Prediction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Hyper-relational Knowledge Graph Completion (HKGC) is more sensitive to inherent noise, particularly struggling with two prevalent HKG-specific noise types: Intra-fact Inconsistency and Cross-fact Association Noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional denoising diffusion framework that learns to reverse structured noise corruption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art HKGC methods in a variety of noisy conditions. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shaofan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang, Shihan Dou, Huiyuan Zheng, Yiming Zhou, Junjie Ye, Shaowen Wang, Shichun Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training reward models are vulnerable to context neglect and degraded accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose distribution-aware reward modeling that augments the RM objective with a conditional mutual information regularizer that maximizes context and the predicted reward conditioned on the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance in RLHF and improves accuracy in other settings. |
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
| Challenge: | Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces . |
Hidden States as Early Signals: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning for Efficient Test-Time Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speed up parallel scaling have relied on similarity-based or confidence-based pruning, but these signals do not reliably indicate trace quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning framework that evaluates reasoning steps using hidden states and dynamically prunes unpromising traces during generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces end-to-end inference latency by 45%–70% on average compared to self-consistency while improving reasoning accuracy. |
LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring based on an annotated learning log . they propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline to enable benchmark expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks evaluate LLMs across three progressive tasks: evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. |
What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | kNN-MT builds an external datastore, which saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily pruned according to local correctness, and it is more explainable. |
TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this alignment involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) Existing approaches involve using RLHF to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels . however, RLRF is susceptible to instability during fine- tuning and presents challenges in implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune large language models with human preferences to achieve precise control of model behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAHF can be used to capture and manipulate representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values rather than being confined to a single concept or function. |
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
MAssistant: A Personal Knowledge Assistant for MOOC Learners (D19-3)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced a rapid development since 2012 . many MOOC platforms have been launched, including Coursera1 , edX2 , and Udacity3 etc. |
| Approach: | They present a personal knowledge assistant system called MAssistant for MOOC learners . MAsistants has a large-scale concept graph built from open data . it also provides a browser extension which interacts with users during video lectures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps users trace the concepts they have learned in MOOCs, and to build their own concept graphs. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks. |
Flooding-X: Improving BERT’s Resistance to Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Restricted Fine-Tuning (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qin Liu, Rui Zheng, Bao Rong, Jingyi Liu, ZhiHua Liu, Zhanzhan Cheng, Liang Qiao, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating adversarial perturbations scale up the cost of training computational complexity by the number of gradient steps it takes to obtain the adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a flood method which aims at better generalization and a criterion to bring hyper-parameter-dependent flooding into effect with a narrowed-down search space by measuring how the gradient steps taken within one epoch affect the loss of each batch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves BERT’s resistance to textual adversarial attacks by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy on various text classification and GLUE tasks. |
Direct Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation Assisted by Synchronized Streaming ASR (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous speech-to-text translation suffer from error propagation and extra latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for simultaneous speech-to-text translation using two separate decoders . they use multitask learning to jointly learn these two tasks with a shared encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves substantially better translation quality at similar levels of latency. |
Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Yang Liu, Yuanhang Zheng, Gang Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Ji Zhang, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) effective neural network methods have been used in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) However, the robustness of the previous neural methods is limited by the large-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised Chinese word segmentation approach with a straightforward and effective architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on 9 different CWS datasets with single criterion training and multiple criteria training and achieves better robustness. |
Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Tianlong Li, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise prompt tuning method that uses a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens to generate an instance-dependent prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieves state-of-the-art by tuning only 0.035% parameters on 14 datasets. |
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. |
A Learning Rate Path Switching Training Paradigm for Version Updates of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhihao Wang, Shiyu Liu, Jianheng Huang, Wang Zheng, YiXuan Liao, Xiaoxin Chen, Junfeng Yao, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Version updates are an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models . a large learning rate in the first stage and a complete learning decay process are crucial for version updates of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning rate path switching training paradigm for version updates of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reduces training cost to 58% when training four versions of LLMs compared to PTFS and CPT . |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zefeng Cai, Xiangyu Li, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Zheng Cao, Weijie Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that STAR outperforms previous pre-training methods and ranks first on the leaderboard . text-to-SQL parsing aims to translate natural language (NL) questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing . they propose two objectives that explore context-dependence of NL utterances and SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two downstream benchmarks and ranks first on the leaderboard. |
GSID: Generative Semantic Indexing for E-Commerce Product Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Haiyang Yang, Qinye Xie, Qingheng Zhang, Chen Li Yu, Huike Zou, Chengbao Lian, Shuguang Han, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Structured product information is a major bottleneck for the efficiency of e-commerce platforms. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven approach to generate product structured representations using product metadata. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GSID can generate better product representations on real-world e-commerce platforms. |
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Ziyan Ma, Haoyang He, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Zihua Rong, Rongjin Li, Kun Ji, Qing Huang, Xinyang Hu, Yang Liu, Qianhe Zheng
| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
Simultaneous Translation with Flexible Policy via Restricted Imitation Learning (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous translation have been limited and use fixed-latency policies or a complicated two-staged model. |
| Approach: | They propose a single model that adds a “delay” token to the target vocabulary and a restricted dynamic oracle to greatly simplify training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better BLEU scores and lower latencies compared to fixed and RL-learned policies on Chinese -> English simultaneous translation. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | kNN-MT uses pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines a pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing model on four benchmark datasets and is open-source. |
ToxiCraft: A Novel Framework for Synthetic Generation of Harmful Information (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for detecting harmful content lack diversity and quality of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing toxic information from social media datasets . their framework generates a wide variety of synthetic, yet remarkably realistic, examples of toxic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate a wide variety of synthetic, yet remarkably realistic, examples of toxic information. |
Legal Fact Prediction: The Missing Piece in Legal Judgment Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junkai Liu, Yujie Tong, Hui Huang, Bowen Zheng, Yiran Hu, Peicheng Wu, Chuan Xiao, Makoto Onizuka, Muyun Yang, Shuyuan Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing studies use legal facts to predict judgments, but legal facts are difficult to obtain in early stages of litigation. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal fact prediction task that takes evidence from trial as input to make predictions in the absence of ground-truth legal facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can predict court rulings without ground-truth legal facts . the first benchmark dataset, LFPBench, is used to evaluate the task . |
A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose Chinese Spelling Check into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks and to train a module that is compatible with existing CSC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can be trained for one model and benefit other models. |
Dialogue Distillation: Open-Domain Dialogue Augmentation Using Unpaired Data (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on training open-domain dialogue models using unpaired data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-level distillation method for training open-domain dialogue models by utilizing unpaired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality dialogue pairs with diverse contents, and can improve competitive baselines. |
POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation due to limited parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a dynamic graph to organize auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation accuracy in low-resource languages (LRLs) using auxiliary language pairs and synthetic pseudo-parallel data. |
STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Mingbo Ma, Liang Huang, Hao Xiong, Renjie Zheng, Kaibo Liu, Baigong Zheng, Chuanqiang Zhang, Zhongjun He, Hairong Liu, Xing Li, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Simultaneous translation is notoriously dif- ficult due to word-order differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-to-prefix framework that implicitly learns to anticipate in a single translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves low latency and reasonable qual- ity on 4 directions. |
Out-of-Domain Intent Detection Considering Multi-Turn Dialogue Contexts (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for OOD intent detection are limited to single dialogue turns. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware OOD intent detection framework to model multi-turn contexts in OOD context detection tasks using unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1-OOD score by 29% on multi-turn OOD detection tasks compared to the previous best method. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning to Defend Word-level Adversarial Text Attack (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks . previous word-based search methods assume important words influence prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for similarizing the influence of words with contrast learning that encourages model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with various training methods and improves model robustness against various adversarial attacks. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Building Multi-domain Dialog State Trackers from Single-domain Dialogs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-domain dialog state tracking models require significant manual effort to define domain relations and collect data. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-and-conquer (DAC) DST paradigm and a multi-domain dialog synthesis framework to build multi- domain DST models from single-domain dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm makes building multi-domain DST models easier on unseen domain combinations. |
Simultaneous Translation Policies: From Fixed to Adaptive (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Adaptive policies can balance translation quality and latency based on context information . previous methods on obtaining adaptive policies rely on complicated training process . |
| Approach: | They propose to obtain adaptive policies by a simple heuristic composition of fixed policies . they propose to use a heurism to obtain policies that can outperform fixed ones . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Chinese -> English and German -> english show that adaptive policies outperform fixed policies by up to 4 BLEU points for the same latency. |
Enhancing Contrastive Learning with Noise-Guided Attack: Towards Continual Relation Extraction in the Wild (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) excel in preserving old knowledge but falter when confronted with contaminated data streams. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-resistant contrastive framework for continual relation extraction (CRE) that preserves old knowledge while learning incremental corrupted relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks with increasing noise rates. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Opportunistic Decoding with Timely Correction for Simultaneous Translation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to balancing translation quality and latency are either too aggressive or too conservative. |
| Approach: | They propose an opportunistic decoding technique that always (over-)generates a certain mount of extra words at each step to keep the audience on track with the latest information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique reduces latency and increases BLEU with no over-generating . it also corrects mistakes in the overgenerated words when observing more context . |
Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Neural Network-based Dependency Parsing Models with Adversarial Examples (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Previously studies focused on semantic tasks such as sentiment analysis, question answering and reading comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to study where and how adversarial examples exist in dependency parsing . they use a state-of-the-art parser to find adversarials in existing texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches show that adversarial examples exist in dependency parsing . they show that up to 77% of input examples admit adversarials . |
Teaching According to Talents! Instruction Tuning LLMs with Competence-Aware Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Yankai Chen, Wei-Chieh Huang, Wenhao Jiang, Hui Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. |
| Approach: | a framework for efficient instruction tuning is proposed to address the issue of curriculum rigidity . current methods rely on static heuristic difficulty metrics and fail to adapt to evolving capabilities . |
| Outcome: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models . current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed learning trajectory . |
Fluent and Low-latency Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Self-adaptive Training (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to simultaneous speech-to-speech translation accumulate more and more latencies in later sentences when the speaker talks faster. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates more fluent target speech latency than the baseline . they propose to use self-adaptive translation to adjust the length of translations to accommodate different source speech rates. |
| Outcome: | Xiong et al., 2019) show that the proposed method generates more fluent target speech latency than baseline . authors say it provides more natural communication process than speech-to-text translation . xiong and colleagues say the proposed technique is more efficient than current approaches . |
Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Binghai Wang, Yantao Liu, Yuxuan Liu, Tianyi Tang, Shenzhi Wang, Chang Gao, Chujie Zheng, Yichang Zhang, Le Yu, Shixuan Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Bowen Yu, Fei Huang, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies observe a phenomenon where reward models achieve high accuracy on static datasets but fail to generalize effectively during RLHF. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy to improve performance on RM-Bench and JudgeBench. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on RM-Bench and JudgeBench by an average of 5% and improves creative writing tasks by 7%. |
Multi-Reference Training with Pseudo-References for Neural Translation and Text Generation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural text generation has been quite successful recently, but during training time, only one reference is considered for each example, even though there are often multiple references available. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to generate exponentially many pseudo-references by compressing existing references into lattices and traversing them to generate new pseudo-References. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on baselines in machine translation and image captioning, and is comparable to existing models. |
Transferable Persona-Grounded Dialogues via Grounded Minimal Edits (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing grounded dialogue models are limited by the distribution of data and the type of grounded concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which edits existing responses to be grounded on a given concept by disentangling and recombining persona-related and persona agnostic parts of the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the personaMi-nEdit dataset and shows that it can improve persona consistency while preserving the use of knowledge and empathy. |
MKT: A Multi-Stage Knowledge Transfer Framework to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-Domain Chinese Spelling Correction (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Peng Xing, Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Xinnian Liang, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shu-Yu Guo, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wenhao Jiang, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) is a model that detects and corrects spelling errors in given sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic model with an evolving teacher model and dynamic distillation weights for knowledge transfer in each domain rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic framework is based on an evolving teacher model and dynamic distillation weights for knowledge transfer in each domain, rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. |
SciMRC: Multi-perspective Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focused on single-perspective question-answer pairs overlooking inherent variation in comprehension levels among different readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective scientific machine reading comprehension dataset . their dataset comprises 741 scientific papers and 6,057 question-answer pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes questions from beginners, students, and experts. |
Traffic-R1: Reinforced LLMs Bring Human-Like Reasoning to Traffic Signal Control Systems (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Rapid urbanization and surging vehicle ownership intensify congestion . rapid urbanization drives crash rates, slow emergency response, and burden transit-poor communities . |
| Approach: | They introduce a 3B-parameter foundation model with human-like reasoning for Traffic signal control (TSC) they use reinforcement learning and network communication to convert LLM into a traffic-control model that operates like a human traffic agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and training-intensive RL controllers on a simulated traffic environment and reduces queue lengths by more than 5%. |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing by POS-Guided Word Reordering (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual dependency parsing rely on large corpus size and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual dependency parsing approach based on word reordering . they propose to train a model that transfers knowledge learned in one or multiple languages to target languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline approach in Hindi and Latin by 15.3% and 6.7%. |
Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mis- and disinformation online are a major source of harms of different kinds . out-of-context information is where different pieces of information are falsely associated . past studies have attempted to defend against OOC mis- and deinformation through external evidence, but they disregard the role of different pieces with different stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a stance extraction network that can extract stances of different pieces of evidence in a single framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a public large-scale dataset with a performance gain of 3.2% in accuracy. |
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Multi-Agent Simulator Drives Language Models for Legal Intensive Interaction (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
ShengbinYue ShengbinYue, Ting Huang, Zheng Jia, Siyuan Wang, Shujun Liu, Yun Song, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced legal intelligence, but the scarcity of scenario data impedes the progress toward interactive legal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-agent Legal Simulation Driver to generate synthetic data by simulating interactive legal scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures consistency of legal attributes between participants and introduces a supervisory mechanism to align participants’ characters and behaviors as well as addressing distractions. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Demons in the Detail: On Implementing Load Balancing Loss for Training Specialized Mixture-of-Expert Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Bo Zheng, Kaiyue Wen, Zekun Wang, Rui Men, Ivan Titov, Dayiheng Liu, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Mixture-of-Experts training frameworks use a micro-batch to calculate LBL . micro-batches are restricted to a single sequence, preventing expert specialization . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a global-batch to loosen the load balance constraint for MoEs models . they propose to synchronize fi across micro-batches and then use it to calculate the LBL . |
| Outcome: | The proposed global-batch LBL improves the domain specialization of experts . the micro-battery LBL is almost at the sequence level, and the router is pushed to distribute the token evenly . |
Marrying Up Regular Expressions with Neural Networks: A Case Study for Spoken Language Understanding (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the combination of regular expressions and NNs improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a neural network (NN) with regular expressions (RE) to improve supervised learning for NLP by exploiting the rich expressiveness of REs at different levels within a NN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yinghui Li, Shang Qin, Jingheng Ye, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shu-Yu Guo, Libo Qin, Xuming Hu, Wenhao Jiang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models’ performance as correctors on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) remains unsatisfactory due to the challenging nature of the task. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework EXAM that uses LLMs as explainers to enhance CGEC small models and a novel evaluation method SEE that utilizes LLM as evaluators to bring more reasonable evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the performance of LLMs on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) task. |
Towards Quantifiable Dialogue Coherence Evaluation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing automatic dialogue coherence evaluation metrics are expensive and high-latency, which cannot meet the requirements of a dialogue system. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train a quantifiable dialogue coherence metric that can reflect actual human rating standards. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the model trained by QuantiDCE presents stronger correlations with human judgements than the other state-of-the-art metrics. |
Dynamic Past and Future for Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models can benefit from modeling translated and untranslated source contents as recurrent states, but this less interpretable recurrence hinders their power to model dynamic updating of and contents during decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the dynamic updating of and contents during decoding by explicitly separating source words into groups of translated and untranslated contents through parts-to-wholes assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements over both Rnmt and Transformer by producing more adequate translations. |
Leveraging Bidding Graphs for Advertiser-Aware Relevance Modeling in Sponsored Search (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing relevance models rely on query-keyword pairs but keywords are usually short texts with scarce semantic information, which may not accurately reflect the underlying advertising purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidding-graph augmented triple-based relevance model with three towers to deeply fuse the bidding graphs and semantic textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large industry dataset and consistently outperformed existing models. |
KdConv: A Chinese Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Knowledge-driven Conversation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-driven dialog data is limited due to the lack of dialog data which consists of multi-turn conversations on multiple topics and with knowledge annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese multi-domain knowledge-driven conversation dataset which grounds the topics in multi-turn conversations to knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be enhanced by introducing background knowledge, but there is still a large space for leveraging knowledge to model multi-turn conversations for further research. |
On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmark (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Sun, Guangxuan Xu, Jiawen Deng, Jiale Cheng, Chujie Zheng, Hao Zhou, Nanyun Peng, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Dialogue safety problems severely limit the real-world deployment of generative conversational models. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy for dialogue safety specifically designed to capture unsafe behaviors in human-bot dialogue settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy captures unsafe behaviors in human-bot dialogue settings with rich context-sensitive unsafe examples. |
Reason from Future: Reverse Thought Chain Enhances LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yinlong Xu, Yanzhao Zheng, Shuoshuo Sun, Shuaihan Huang, Baohua Dong, Zhu Hangcheng, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning paradigms that focus on local optimum reasoning lack global perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional reasoning paradigm that generates reasoning paths by bidirectional planning and bottom-up reasoning accumulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning paradigm outperforms conventional paradigms with higher accuracy and less searching space to solve complex tasks. |
Quantifying Association Capabilities of Large Language Models and Its Implications on Privacy Leakage (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study examines the association capabilities of large language models . as models scale up, their ability to associate entities/information intensifies . however, there is a performance gap when associating commonsense knowledge versus PII, with the latter showing lower accuracy. |
| Approach: | They examine the association capabilities of large language models and identify factors that influence their proficiency in associating information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show a performance gap when associating commonsense knowledge versus PII, with the latter showing lower accuracy. |
Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding (2022.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic ICD coding use label attention to match related text snippets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use code synonyms to leverage for better code representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on the MIMIC-III dataset. |
Exploration and Exploitation: Two Ways to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction Models (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that a sequence-to-sequence learning framework with neural networks can be effective for Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence learning framework with neural networks that generates more valuable training instances and adds task-specific examples to enhance the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization and robustness of multiple CSC models across three datasets. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiru Yang, Haoran Zheng, Tong Ju, Shiting Wang, Wanchun Ni, Jiajun Liu, Shangguang Wang, Yongfeng Huang, Tao Qi
| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated knowledge poisoning attacks in medical RAG systems . knowledge poison attacks can disrupt model outputs and undermine system reliability . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge poisoning framework that injects misinformation into textual data . they propose to use paired visual data as a query-agnostic trigger to promote retrieval . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces clinically plausible but incorrect generations on five LLMs and datasets. |
Modeling the Q-Diversity in a Min-max Play Game for Robust Optimization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for minimizing the worst-case loss of annotated groups are lacking in practice due to expensive annotations and privacy issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributionally robust optimization framework that relaxes group identification into direct parameterization by using an interactive training mode. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world text classification tasks. |
CrossWOZ: A Large-Scale Chinese Cross-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset (2020.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the significant contributions to the community, there is still a gap between existing dialogue corpora and real-life human dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop Chinese cross-domain wizard-of-oz task-oriented dataset CrossWOZ with rich annotations of dialogue states and dialogue acts on both user and system sides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 6K dialogue sessions and 102K utterances for 5 domains, including hotel, restaurant, attraction, metro, and taxi. |
Diffusion Language Model Inference with Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Huang, Kiran Ramnath, Yueyan Chen, Aosong Feng, Sangmin Woo, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Shuai Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference use heuristics to determine which positions to unmask and which tokens to commit . MEDAL is an inference-time scaling framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 22.0% improvement over existing inference strategies across multiple benchmarks. |
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yaming Yang, Huang Hu, Fei Xu, Jessica Zhang, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multimodal dialogue models but neglect generation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialogue response generation task which requires multimodal dialogs containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses. |
Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models are often not well aligned with human intents, which requires additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) to perform alignments on large language models that are not well aligned with human intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and is model-agnostic. |
CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing empathetic dialogue models only consider the affective aspect of empathy, which limits the capability of emotional response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that aligns the user's cognition and affection at both the coarse-grained and fine-grounded levels and then automatically and manually evaluates the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and generates more empathetic and informative responses. |
Improving Simultaneous Translation by Incorporating Pseudo-References with Fewer Reorderings (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing systems for simultaneous translation are still trained on full-sentence bitexts due to the abundance of unnecessary long-distance reorderings. |
| Approach: | They propose to rewrite target side of existing full-sentence corpora into simultaneous-style translation by adding generated pseudo-references to the target side. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ZhEn and JaEn simultaneous translation show that the proposed method improves on existing full-sentence corpora. |
PlugAT: A Plug and Play Module to Defend against Textual Adversarial Attack (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by adversarially perturbed examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable defense module PlugAT to provide robust predictions by adding a few trainable parameters to the model inputs while keeping the original model frozen. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness over several strong baselines whilst training only 9.1% parameters. |
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that extract discrete inputs into fixed-length representations are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place perturbations on clean inputs to fool DNNs. |
| Approach: | They propose to inspect the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis to better understand adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which boosts model robustness and motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense. |
Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Shihan Dou, Yuhao Zhou, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang, Menghan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adversarial samples are more vulnerable than normal ones to textual adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector that can distinguish adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous detection methods by large margins on three text classification tasks. |
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong learning (LL) models require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture-based lifelong learning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in handling unseen tasks and focuses on task-level prompts to capture knowledge from different granularities. |
Finding Influential Instances for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Distant supervision models suffer from high label noise and are not reliable for DS. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic instance sampling method for relation extraction (RE) by influence function, namely REIF. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational complexity from O(mn) to O(1), with analyzing its robustness on the selected sampling function. |
CDConv: A Benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chujie Zheng, Jinfeng Zhou, Yinhe Zheng, Libiao Peng, Zhen Guo, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-Yu Niu, Hua Wu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting dialogue contradictions are difficult due to contextualization nature of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations . they use automatic conversation generation to simulate common user behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark simulated the user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions . the results show that the current state-of-the-art chatbot can be easily goaded into making contradictions. |
Difference-aware Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-grounded Conversation Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection models are limited by the context, but the difference between selected knowledge at different turns is often overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose a difference-aware knowledge selection method that computes the difference between the candidate knowledge sentences provided at the current turn and those chosen in the previous turns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in a knowledge-grounded dialog. |
2D-DPO: Scaling Direct Preference Optimization with 2-Dimensional Supervision (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Shilong Li, Yancheng He, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Jiaheng Liu, Hangyu Guo, Weixun Wang, Jihao Gu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods that optimize for scalar scores or ranking reward ignore multi-dimensional nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the preference of Direct Preference Optimization to two dimensions: segments and aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes the overall objective into multi-segment and multi-aspect objectives. |
Long-Tailed Question Answering in an Open World (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing QA approaches require access to seen tasks or do not explicitly model samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-tailed QA model that encourages knowledge sharing between head, tail and unseen tasks and explicitly mines knowledge from a large pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on a large-scale dataset. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
Weight Perturbation as Defense against Adversarial Word Substitutions (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existence and pervasiveness of textual adversarial examples have raised serious concerns to security-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform weight perturbations in the parameter space rather than the input feature space to improve adversarial robustness of NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves adversarial robustness of models by performing weight perturbations in the parameter space rather than the input feature space. |
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Rui Zheng, Yuansen Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Qin Liu, Wenbin Lai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weifeng Ge
| Challenge: | Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Speculative Contrastive Decoding (2024.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance in language tasks, yet their auto-regressive inference is limited due to high computational requirements and is sub-optimal due to the exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding approach that leverages predictions from smaller language models to achieve both decoding acceleration and quality improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves both decoding acceleration and quality improvement on four diverse language tasks. |
Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu, Siyuan Liang, Ning Li, Zirui Hu, Weibo Gao, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Leszek Rutkowski, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing training data detectors fail to detect clean samples from contaminated test sets . existing methods fail to identify clean samples due to black-box nature of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data . they propose 'failure detection' to reduce the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false discovery rate (FDR) under valid FDR control while maintaining evaluation consistency. |
ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Shutong Feng, Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Dazhen Wan, Xiaochen Zhu, Jianfeng Gao, Milica Gasic, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for building TOD systems often lack a user-friendly interface . a toolkit with advanced, easily integrable modules is needed to bridge this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit that integrates diverse datasets and models with a streamlined training process and in-depth evaluation tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit combines RL and transfer learning to support the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Asymmetric Conflict and Synergy in Post-training for LLM-based Multilingual Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work in LLM-based MMT typically mitigates the Curse of Multilinguality . asymmetric phenomenon in linguistic conflicts and synergy varies in different translation directions . |
| Approach: | They propose a direction-aware training approach to address asymmetry in linguistic conflicts and synergy . they propose X-ALMA-13B-Pretrain with multilingual pre-training to achieve comparable performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable performance to X-ALMA-13B-Pretrain (only SFT) with fewer pretraining tokens and 17B parameters. |
Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Luyao Cheng, Hui Wang, Chong Deng, Siqi Zheng, Yafeng Chen, Rongjie Huang, Qinglin Zhang, Qian Chen, Xihao Li, Wen Wang
| Challenge: | Mainstream speaker diarization systems rely only on acoustic information, making it challenging in complex aural environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that integrates audio, visual, and semantic cues to enhance speaker diarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multi-party conversations . it integrates audio-visual-semantic cues into the clustering process for acoustic speaker embeddings . |
MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Ran Gong, Qiuyuan Huang, Xiaojian Ma, Yusuke Noda, Zane Durante, Zilong Zheng, Demetri Terzopoulos, Li Fei-Fei, Jianfeng Gao, Hoi Vo
| Challenge: | Large foundation models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete complex tasks that require extensive collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a gaming-based infrastructure that evaluates LFMs' planning and coordination capabilities in the context of gaming interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed infrastructure can be deployed in a customized VR version of Cuisineworld and adapted in the “Minecraft” domain. |
Scaling Laws for Code: A More Data-Hungry Regime (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xianzhen Luo, Wenzhen Zheng, Qingfu Zhu, Rongyi Zhang, Houyi Li, Siming Huang, YuanTao Fan, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Code Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing software engineering, but scaling laws are primarily analyzed on Natural Language (NL). |
| Approach: | They fit Chinchilla law and Farsser law to test scaling laws for code . they find code is more data-hungry and requires higher data-to-parameter ratio . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws show that the more expressive Farsser law offers greater accuracy and scales with model size. |
DIAG-NRE: A Neural Pattern Diagnosis Framework for Distantly Supervised Neural Relation Extraction (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for labeling relational facts require significant expert labor to write relation-specific patterns, which makes them too sophisticated to generalize quickly. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pattern diagnosis framework that can summarize and refine relation-specific patterns with human experts in the loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can summarize and refine high-quality relational patterns from noise data with human experts in the loop. |
AIR: Complex Instruction Generation via Automatic Iterative Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex instructions are resource-intensive and lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate complex instructions with constraints using a document-generated initial instruction and an iterative refinement framework to incorporate LLM-as-judge guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for generating complex instructions, and outperformed existing methods. |
HyPe: Better Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning with Hidden Representation Perturbation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing techniques to fine-tune pre-trained language models on downstream tasks are inadequate. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to perturb hidden Transformers representations by enhancing generalization of hidden representations from different layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms vanilla fine-tuning and enhances generalization of hidden representations from different layers. |
RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yancheng Wang, Ziyan Jiang, Zheng Chen, Fan Yang, Yingxue Zhou, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingzhen Yang
| Challenge: | Existing recommendations systems are limited in generalizing to new tasks due to model scale and data size constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered autonomous recommender agent, RecMind, which is capable of leveraging external knowledge to provide zero-shot personalized recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing zero/few-shot LLM-based recommendation baseline methods in various tasks and achieves comparable performance to a fully trained recommendation model P5. |
Diversifying Dialog Generation via Adaptive Label Smoothing (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialog generation suffer from the over-confidence issue, which leads to poor generation diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Label Smoothing approach that can adaptively estimate a target label distribution at each time step for different dialog contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms competing models on two benchmark datasets in producing diverse responses. |
Retrieval-Augmented Language Models are Mimetic Theorem Provers (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wenjie Yang, Ruiyuan Huang, Jiaxing Guo, Zicheng Lyu, Tongshan Xu, Shengzhong Zhang, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Zengfeng Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models often fail to provide rigorous proof-based reasoning for research-level mathematics. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective RAG framework that augments retrieved proofs with queries and document contexts to improve retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval performance by 34.19% . dual RAG can be used to prove research-level theorems in theoretical machine learning . |
ChID: A Large-scale Chinese IDiom Dataset for Cloze Test (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | cloze-style reading comprehension in Chinese is limited due to the lack of various corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese cloze test dataset ChID which studies the comprehension of idiom in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares the performance of the proposed model with human models. |
LVP-M3: Language-aware Visual Prompt for Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances struggle to train a separate model for each language pair, which is costly and unaffordable when the number of languages increases in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose to train different MMT models to support translations between different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to handle the above issues by providing a shared semantic space for multiple languages. |
Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models contain smaller matching subnetworks that are not robust to adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to find robust tickets hidden in pre-trained language models by learning binary weight masks and an adversarial loss objective to guide the search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation. |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
Uncovering Argumentative Flow: A Question-Focus Discourse Structuring Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing structure modeling approaches fail to capture the author’s rhetorical intent and reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a Question-Focus discourse structuring framework that explicitly models the underlying argumentative flow by anchoring each argumentative unit to a guiding question and a set of attentional foci. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and curated models on an argument reconstruction task in Chinese think-tank articles and claims coverage. |
Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with opposite Agent Awareness (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for goal-oriented dialogue policy learning focus on the target agent policy and treat the opposite agent policy as part of the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for policy learning in goal-oriented dialogues that uses the opposite agent's policy estimation to improve the target agent by regarding it as part of the target policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows superior performance over state-of-the-art models on cooperative and competitive dialogue tasks. |
TableVLM: Multi-modal Pre-training for Table Structure Recognition (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Tables are useful for displaying data in an organized manner, but they are difficult to extract from images because of their structure, notation, and representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal pre-training model for table structure recognition that captures table structure-related features by multiple unsupervised objectives inspired by masked visual-language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves tree-editing-distance-score on ComplexTable by 1.97% . |
Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotional Support Conversation task and an ESC Framework to train emotional support into dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides an example of an Emotional Support Conversation task and shows that it is more effective than existing models. |
Speculative Beam Search for Simultaneous Translation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Beam search is widely used in (full-sentence) machine translation but its application to simultaneous translation remains highly non-trivial. |
| Approach: | They propose a beam search algorithm that hallucinates several steps into the future to reach a more accurate decision by implicitly benefiting from a target language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on language models over diverse language pairs and shows significant improvements over greedy search. |
ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are susceptible to subtle perturbations and require multiple adversarial training during fine-tuning to improve their robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial defense method ORTicket that fine-tunes a model for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable robustness to other defense methods while maintaining the efficiency of fine-tuning. |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
Rethinking and Refining the Distinct Metric (2022.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for calculating distinct scores have evident biases that assign higher penalties to longer sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale the number of distinct tokens based on their expectations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric removes evident biases in the original distinct score . the proposed meter correlates better with human judgment in evaluating response diversity . |
Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Zou, Ziqi Huang, Yuhao Dong, Shulin Tian, Dian Zheng, Hongbo Liu, Jingwen He, Bin Liu, Yu Qiao, Ziwei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations treat visual understanding and generation in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that examines the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains. |
Aligned Dual Channel Graph Convolutional Network for Visual Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods focus only on relations between objects in an image and neglect the importance of syntactic dependency relations between words. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual channel graph convolutional network to capture relations between objects in an image and syntactic dependency relations between words in a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art approaches. |
Defense against Synonym Substitution-based Adversarial Attacks via Dirichlet Neighborhood Ensemble (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples that intentionally fool the networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training a robust model to defense synonym substitution-based attacks by sampling embedding vectors for each word in an input sentence and augmenting them with the training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other proposed defense methods by a significant margin across different network architectures and multiple data sets. |
Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models are expensive because of the need to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial optimization method that searches for robust tickets with structured sparsity in the early stage and fine-tunes tickets in the remaining time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 7 13 training speedups while maintaining comparable or even better robustness compared to the most competitive state-of-the-art methods. |
LIST: Linearly Incremental SQL Translator for Single-Hop Reasoning, Generation and Verification (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing schema linking methods are not able to handle complex SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that transforms SQL queries into grammatically verifiable sub-queries which are arranged sequentially to reflect single-hop reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves significant performance gains on the BIRD dataset and surpasses schema linking methods at comparable or better cost. |
AutoGraph-R1: End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai, Haoyu Huang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Shujie Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Currently, knowledge graphs are decoupled from their downstream application, resulting in suboptimal graph structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to directly optimize KG construction for task performance using Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across multiple QA benchmarks and consistently achieves significant performance gains over task-agnostic baseline graphs. |
How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors pose significant risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior serving as a foundation for future research. |
Raw Pointer Rewriting with LLMs for Translating C to Safer Rust (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | C2Rust is a system programming language that enforces strict memory and type safety guarantees. |
| Approach: | They propose a raw pointer rewriting technique that lifts raw pointers in individual functions to appropriate Rust data structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique eliminates 18.57% of local raw pointers and improves memory safety on 28 real-world C projects. |
Are All Prompt Components Value-Neutral? Understanding the Heterogeneous Adversarial Robustness of Dissected Prompt in LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Zheng, Tianhao Li, Haotian Huang, Tianyu Zeng, Jingyu Lu, Chuangxin Chu, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Qian Xiong, Yuyao Ge, Mingyang Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat prompts as flat text, overlooking their internal structure, and different components within a prompt contribute unequally to robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes prompts into functional components and a method that selectively modifies components to expose component-wise vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exposes component-wise vulnerabilities while ensuring linguistic plausibility through perplexity-based filtering. |
Traces in the Brain: Neural Evidence for Syntactic Movement in English and Chinese (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhan Huang, Zhengwu Ma, Yuqi Jin, Beth Chan, Zheng Shen, Jackie Yan-Ki Lai, John T. Hale, Jixing Li
| Challenge: | Syntactic movement is a core concept in generative linguistics to account for word-order variation and long-distance dependencies. |
| Approach: | They annotated every sentence in the audiobook The Little Prince using X-bar style tree annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that deep structure significantly predicts neural responses in English but not in Chinese. |
Probing Cross-modal Semantics Alignment Capability from the Textual Perspective (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new probing method that is based on image captioning to first empirically study the cross-modal semantics alignment of VLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes captions generated by five popular VLP models to reveal how well they align with visual words and how well these align with images. |
ViT-TTS: Visual Text-to-Speech with Scalable Diffusion Transformer (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-to-speech (TTS) performance has improved with the advent of denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models . however, perceived quality of audio depends on content, pitch, rhythm, and energy . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers that complement phoneme sequences with visual information to generate high-perceived audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models regardless of visibility of the scene . it can generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for AR and VR applications . |
RPD: A Distance Function Between Word Embeddings (2020.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings are poorly understood, but little is known about how they differ between different sets of word embeds. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric called Relative Pairwise Inner Product Distance to quantify the distance between different word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric measures the distance between different sets of embeddings and investigates the influence of different training processes and corpora. |
Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Generating accurate SQL queries for user questions rely on the capability of large language models (LLMs) however, some knowledge is not explicitly included in the database schema and user question or has been learned by LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-to-SQL framework that employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all text-to SQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-SQL tasks by leveraging a data expert LLM (DELLM) to provide useful knowledge for all text- to-SqL models. |
Fusing Heterogeneous Factors with Triaffine Mechanism for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental natural language processing task that extracts entities from texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a triaffine mechanism which integrates heterogeneous factors into a single model to fuse these factors into one model to achieve better span representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous span-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art F1 scores on nested NER datasets GENIA and KBP2017. |
UPLex: Fine-Grained Personality Control in Large Language Models via Unsupervised Lexical Modulation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tianlong Li, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Zhenghua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Personality is a crucial factor that shapes human communication patterns, thereby regulating the personalities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses an Unsupervisedly-Built Personalized Lexicon (UPL) during the decoding phase to manipulate LLM’s personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can modulate the personality expression of large language models by dynamically altering their predicted probability of upcoming words in a pluggable fashion. |
CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for empathetic response generation ignore hierarchical relationships between different factors, leading to a weak ability of empathy modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-factor hierarchical framework for empathetic response generation which models the above three key factors in a hierarchically structured way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more empathetic responses than previous methods. |
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jialong Zuo, Minghui Fang, Ziyue Jiang, Hai Huang, Zehan Wang, Xize Cheng, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
SynPrompt: Syntax-aware Enhanced Prompt Engineering for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of prompt-tuning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) are crude and simple. |
| Approach: | They propose a Syntax-aware Enhanced Prompt method which mines syntactic information related to aspect words from the syntaktic dependency tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the syntactic knowledge embedded in PLMs and achieves favorable results on three benchmark datasets. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
GRADE: Automatic Graph-Enhanced Coherence Metric for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics only consider surface features or utterance-level semantics, without explicitly considering the fine-grained topic transition dynamics of dialogue flows. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-enhanced evaluation metric GRADE to evaluate dialogue coherence . GRADE incorporates utterance-level contextualized representations and fine-grained topic-level graph representations to improve communication logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric outperforms state-of-the-art metrics on measuring diverse dialogue models in terms of Pearson and Spearman correlations with human judgments. |
DCMKC: A Dual Consistency Matching Approach for Multi-hop Question Answering in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning based on chains of thought (CoTs) fails to find logical connections between reasoning steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to match KG reasoning chains with CoTs based on semantic similarity . they use a knowledge graph to find relevant information "within" each reasoning step . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multi-answer questions with 5.1% improvement over baselines. |
Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Qingyu Zhou, Zhongli Li, Li Yangning, Shulin Huang, Ruiyang Liu, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which renders Chinese Spell Checking model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenzhi Wang, Chang Liu, Zilong Zheng, Siyuan Qi, Shuo Chen, Qisen Yang, Andrew Zhao, Chaofei Wang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant success in using LLMs as agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive framework that incorporates first-order and second-order perspective transitions into LLMs to enhance their ability to identify and counteract deceptive information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances LLMs’ ability to identify and counteract deceptive information without extra fine-tuning and data. |
Refiner: Restructure Retrieved Content Efficiently to Advance Question-Answering Capabilities (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited by their parametric knowledge, leading to hallucinations in knowledge-extensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end extract-and-restructure paradigm that leverages a single decoder-only LLM to adaptively extract query-relevant contents verbatim along with the necessary context. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that a trained Refiner outperforms state-of-the-art RAG and compressing approaches in multiple tasks. |
Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editing (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to fine-tuning neural models that scales and biases the representation produced at each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 25,700 compared to full parameter fine-tuning and by . 32 compared with LoRA. |
Evidence Retrieval is almost All You Need for Fact Verification (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evidence retrieval methods adopt a trivial retrieval strategy, resulting in task-irrelevant evidence and undesirable performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evidence retrieval and joint fact verification that integrates two modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence retrieval and claims verification on a FEVER dataset. |
Lightweight LLM Agent Memory with Small Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaquan Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Zhenzhen Huang, Pengcheng Zheng, Zhicheng Wang, Ping Guo, Fan Mo, Sung-Ho Bae, Jie Zou, Jiwei Wei, Yang Yang
| Challenge: | Existing external memory systems for LLMs have low online overhead but are unstable in accumulating latency over long interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models . lightmem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation . they show consistent gains across model scales and high efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves agent memory but has low latency and low online overhead . it separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation . the proposed system achieves an average F1 improvement of 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo . |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
CoLAKE: Contextualized Language and Knowledge Embedding (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for integrating factual knowledge into pre-trained language models are shallow, static, and separately pre-train entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates knowledge contexts from large-scale knowledge bases into a unified data structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on knowledge-driven tasks and knowledge probing tasks. |
Disentangling Reasoning Logic to Resolve Explicit Knowledge Conflicts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to resolve explicit knowledge conflicts are based on semantic decoding and auxiliary embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves on existing models. |
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability. |
Estimating Soft Labels for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-dominance (OOD) intents are limited by the lack of OOD samples. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive soft pseudo labeling method that can estimate soft labels for pseudo OOD samples when training OOD detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing methods on three benchmark datasets and consistently outperformed previous methods. |
Dynamic Emotion and Personality Profiling for Multimodal Deception Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for deception detection lack sample-level dynamic annotations for emotions and personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-model multi-prompt annotation scheme and a strict label quality evaluation standard for deception, emotion, and personality annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on the MDPE and DDEP datasets. |
SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog understanding only consider self-augmented dialogs as positive samples and treat all other dialogs like negative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured pre-trained conversation model which learns dialog representations from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised contrastive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on the DialoGLUE benchmark. |
AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Crowdsourced dialogue corpora are limited in scale and topic coverage due to the expensive cost of data curation. |
| Approach: | They construct an augmented dataset for the emotional support conversation task using large language models for dialogue augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines of dialogue augmentation and improves the model's generalization ability to open-domain topics. |
Collision to Cognition: Hash-Driven Graph Construction for Efficient RAG (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chuang Zhou, Zheng Yuan, Linhao Luo, Zhaozhuo Xu, Yilin Xiao, Junnan Dong, Siyu An, di Yin, Xing Sun, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been used for enhancing large language models with external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for mining efficient graph structures via hashing to enhance RAG . they adopt an inductive paradigm where global graph structure emerges from local hash collisions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while requiring no GPU resources or token budget. |
VIB-Probe: Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models via Variational Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing hallucination detection methods rely on external verification tools . however, entanglement of visual-linguistic syntax and noise makes it difficult to detect hallucis . |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection framework that leverages the Variational Information Bottleneck theory to detect hallucinic heads and to infer hallucication mitigation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in hallucinations and noise detection environments. |
Generating Responses with a Specific Emotion in Dialog (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EmoDS can express emotions in both ways, but it is difficult to scale to large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional dialog system that can express emotions in both ways . they use strong emotional words and neutral words to increase the intensity of emotions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better than baselines in BLEU, diversity and quality of emotional expression. |
ConvLab-2: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhu, Zheng Zhang, Yan Fang, Xiang Li, Ryuichi Takanobu, Jinchao Li, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | ConvLab-2 inherits Convlab's framework but integrates more powerful dialogue models and supports more datasets. |
| Approach: | They present ConvLab-2, an open-source toolkit that enables researchers to build task-oriented dialogue systems with state-of-the-art models and perform an end-to-end evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The new tool inherits ConvLab's framework and extends it by integrating many recently proposed state-of-the-art dialogue models. |
Helping the Weak Makes You Strong: Simple Multi-Task Learning Improves Non-Autoregressive Translators (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive (NAR) neural machine translation models require a conditional independence assumption on target sequences, resulting in less informative learning signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic multi-task learning framework to provide more informative learning signals for NAR models under conventional MLE training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy of multiple NAR baselines without additional decoding overhead. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
Taming Language Models for Text-attributed Graph Learning with Decoupled Aggregation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning text-attributed graphs neglect interaction between textual and structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates textual and structural information into TAG learning . they propose combining semantic aggregation and structural aggregations to improve learning a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art learning methods while requiring less resources. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Chinese SimpleQA: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Yingshui Tan, Weixun Wang, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hangyu Guo, Chengwei Hu, Boren Zheng, Zhuoran Lin, Dekai Sun, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Current frontier models sometimes generate false outputs or answers that are not substantiated by evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose Chinese SimpleQA, a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' factuality . they focus on Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics . |
| Outcome: | The Chinese SimpleQA benchmark evaluates the factuality ability of LLMs . the questions and answers are short and easy-to-evaluate . |
Enhancing Unsupervised Semantic Parsing with Distributed Contextual Representations (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn models on corpus of pairs of sentences require labor-intensive annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage distributed contextual word and phrase representations pre-trained on unlabelled texts to deal with homonymy and polysemy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better accuracy on question-answering and relation extraction tasks. |
Mitigating Position Bias in Transformers via Layer-Specific Positional Embedding Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding, Changze Lv, Yixin Wu, Tianlong Li, Zhibo Xu, Muling Wu, Tianyuan Shi, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the "lost-in-the-middle" problem suffer from high latency or suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific positional embedding scaling method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks. |
Revisiting Jailbreaking for Large Language Models: A Representation Engineering Perspective (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianlong Li, Zhenghua Wang, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) however, limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks has been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose that LLMs' self-safeguarding capability is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be detected with a few pairs of contrastive queries, and the robustness can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. |
SKGSum: Structured Knowledge-Guided Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiqi Wang, Ruofan Wang, Kaiqi Zhao, Robert Amor, Benjamin Liu, Jiamou Liu, Xianda Zheng, Zijian Huang
| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods ignore the importance of summary structure, resulting in summaries that emphasize the most prominent information while omitting essential details from other sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses automatically extracted summary points to generate summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve quality and BERTScore of summaries and broaden the types of documents that can be effectively summarized. |
Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Defective queries impact the robustness of conversational AI systems such as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. |
| Approach: | They propose a Personalized Query Rewriting system that takes into account individual preferences or unique error patterns identified from a user's historical interactions with the conversational AI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has been proven on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments. |
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Enyu Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Songyang Gao, Xiaoran Fan, Zichu Fei, Jingting Ye, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability. |
Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Zheng, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Zewen Chi, Saksham Singhal, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that consistency regularization improves cross-lingual fine-tuning . pre-trained cross-linguistic models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the other . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization . they use example consistency regularized to penalize prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across tasks . it can be generalized to other target languages without additional training . |
CaDRL: Document-level Relation Extraction via Context-aware Differentiable Rule Learning (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Kunli Zhang, Pengcheng Wu, Bohan Yu, Kejun Wu, Aoze Zheng, Xiyang Huang, Chenkang Zhu, Min Peng, Hongying Zan, Yu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction (DocRE) lack logic and transparency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Context-aware differentiable rule learning framework that learns the doc-specific logical rule to avoid suboptimal constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing rule-based frameworks on three DocRE datasets. |
Learning Representation Mapping for Relation Detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect relation detection only get high accuracy for questions whose relations have been seen in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn representation mapping for both seen and unseen relations based on previously learned relation embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of unseen relations while keeping the performance comparable to the state-of-the-art. |
Alignment before Awareness: Towards Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery via Optimal Transport and Answer Semantics (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent models for visual question localized-answering (VQLA) lack the ability to relate these answers to their localization at an instance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which introduces optimal transport to achieve bidirectional and fine-grained alignment between images and questions, enabling more precise localization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two widely-used datasets on surgical scenes and surgical instruments. |
Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that denoising word alignment improves cross-lingual transferability . most applications and resources are still English-centric, making non-English users hard to access. |
| Approach: | They propose to denoise word alignment as a cross-lingual pre-training task . they first self-label word alignments for parallel sentences and then mask tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability on token-level tasks, especially on question answering, and structured prediction. |
Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function. |
Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations require large numbers of observations to be retrieved, increasing response times. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods in efficiency and precision of hallucination detection. |
LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks, such as MMLU, C-Eval, and GSM8K, evaluate models by posing a variety of problems, including problems about mathematics, science, law, and general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark which assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |
Using Context-to-Vector with Graph Retrofitting to Improve Word Embeddings (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
PsychePass: Calibrating LLM Therapeutic Competence via Trajectory-Anchored Tournaments (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | evaluating therapeutic competence of large language models remains challenging due to unstructured and longitudinal nature of counseling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
Watermarking PLMs on Classification Tasks by Combining Contrastive Learning with Weight Perturbation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chenxi Gu, Xiaoqing Zheng, Jianhan Xu, Muling Wu, Cenyuan Zhang, Chengsong Huang, Hua Cai, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are highly valuable intellectual property due to their expensive training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed backdoors that can be triggered by specific inputs into models by model watermarking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to protect the intellectual property of large pre-trained language models without knowledge about downstream tasks. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in VLMs: Enhancing Visual Attention via Head-Wise Perturbation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks that require joint understanding of text and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that incorporates head-wise attention perturbation via continuous multiplicative noise coupled with a visual-guided loss focused on vision-sensitive text tokens to promote a more balanced attention distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on three benchmarks and consistently outperformed the baseline model. |
Modality-Aware Integration with Large Language Models for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate multimodal knowledge in a modality-agnostic manner can be sub-optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-aware integration with large language models (LLMs) that leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to bridge a tight inter-modal exchange while preserving insightful intra-modal learning. |
SimulBench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models do not fully evaluate their potential for broad implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fixed LLM as a user agent to engage with an LLM to collect dialogues first under different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms LLaMA-3-70b-Chat on 18.55% more cases. |
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Yiming Liang, Leo Jin, Junting Zhou, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Mingshan Chang, Tianyu Zheng, Xincheng Zhang, Nuo Ma, Zekun Moore Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Haihong Wu, Hongquan Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. |
Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
COLD: A Benchmark for Chinese Offensive Language Detection (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Offensive language detection is crucial for maintaining a civilized social media platform and deploying pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark benchmark for Chinese offensive language analysis including a Chinese Offensive Language Dataset and a baseline detector which is trained on the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contributes to Chinese offensive language detection which is challenging for existing resources. |
Beyond Surface Features: Advancing Medical Vision-Language Alignment via Dynamic Evidence-Guided Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zixuan Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Xiaolong Liu, Yanchao Hao, Manman Zhang, Zheng Wei, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu, Ye Li, Fen Miao, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based methods for medical large vision-Language Models face limitations in medical settings . existing methods are limited by overfitting to superficial cues and pseudo convergence of the preference signal. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on text-based mental health counseling is limited due to the lack of relevant corpora in Chinese language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset of psychological health support in the form of question and answer pair that is crawled from a mental health service platform and contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
Learning to Stop in Structured Prediction for Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Beam search optimization solves many problems in neural machine translation, but lacks principled stopping criteria and does not learn how to stop during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking method which enables an optimal beam search stop-ping criteria and a structured prediction loss function which penalizes suboptimal finished candidates produced by beam search during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on synthetic and real languages show that the proposed methods improve translation quality and length. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Towards Adversarially Robust Text Classifiers by Learning to Reweight Clean Examples (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defense methods improve the adversarial robustness by making models adapt to training set augmented with some adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a reweighting mechanism to calibrate the training distribution to obtain robust models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method minimizes the loss of validation set mixed with clean examples and adversarial ones in an online learning manner. |
A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for length control summarization treat the length requirement as a soft constraint, which may not always be satisfied. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel length-control decoding algorithm based on the directed acyclic Transformer (DAT) their approach allows for multiple plausible sequence fragments and predicts a path to connect them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm allows for multiple plausible sequence fragments and predicts a path to connect them. |
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia, Siwei Wu, Feiteng Fang, Yizhi Li, Shuyue Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Jiawei Guo, Bo Li, Haoning Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jian Yang, Ruibo Liu, Xiang Yue, Jiaheng Liu, Chenghua Lin, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. |
Incremental Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Prefix-to-Prefix Framework (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Mingbo Ma, Baigong Zheng, Kaibo Liu, Renjie Zheng, Hairong Liu, Kainan Peng, Kenneth Church, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) has seen rapid progress in recent years, but still suffers from latencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural incremental TTS approach that synthesizes speech in an online fashion, playing a segment of audio while generating the next. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on English and Chinese TTS show that the proposed approach achieves similar speech naturalness compared to full sentence TTS, but with a constant (1-2 words) latency. |
Measure Children’s Mindreading Ability with Machine Reading (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing scoring models do not take the features of the stories and video clips into account when scoring, which will reduce the accuracy of the models. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the features extracted from stories and videos related to the questions being asked during the children’s mindreading evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework agrees well with human experts on scores produced by the models. |
ProMed: Shapley Information Gain Guided Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Medical LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Click: Controllable Text Generation with Sequence Likelihood Contrastive Learning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current language models have shown impressive capability of generating fluent and grammatical text, but they often produce behaviors misaligned with human expectations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new language model called Leo for controllable text generation which employs a contrastive loss on sequence likelihood which fundamentally decreases the generation probability of negative samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on language detoxification, sentiment steering, and repetition reduction tasks. |
A Unified Dialogue User Simulator for Few-shot Data Augmentation (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment large-scale task-oriented dialogues rely on annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a unified dialogue user simulation model by pre-training on publicly available datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be tuned on a target domain with few-shot data. |
ConvLab: Multi-Domain End-to-End Dialog System Platform (P19-3)
Copied to clipboard
Sungjin Lee, Qi Zhu, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zheng Zhang, Yaoqin Zhang, Xiang Li, Jinchao Li, Baolin Peng, Xiujun Li, Minlie Huang, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | ConvLab is an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform . it allows researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches in common environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform to train and evaluate dialog bots in common environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches in common environments. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
AgenticQwen: Training Small Agentic Language Models with Dual Data Flywheels for Industrial-Scale Tool Use (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern industrial applications increasingly demand language models capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a model family that trains via multi-round reinforcement learning on synthetic data and open-source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model train on synthetic and open-source data achieves strong performance on multiple agentic benchmarks and in an industrial agent system. |
Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baselines in 99% of all settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sliding window technique to pack data before continual pre-training to preserve contextual information and enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method outperforming baselines in 99% of settings. |
MORE-3S:Multimodal-based Offline Reinforcement Learning with Shared Semantic Spaces (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) focus on learning value functions or policy gradients, but they view it as a sequence modeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal and pre-trained language models to transform offline reinforcement learning into a supervised learning task by integrating state information derived from images and action-related data obtained from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on Atari and OpenAI Gym environments while promoting long-term strategic thinking. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
Promoting Data and Model Privacy in Federated Learning through Quantized LoRA (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhu JianHao, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Tianlong Li, Zixuan Ling, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing federated learning frameworks require substantial data and computational resources to develop large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that distributes a quantized version of the model’s parameters during training and combine it with a popular fine-tuning method to significantly reduce communication costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables accurate estimations for parameter updates while preventing clients from accessing a model whose performance is comparable to the centrally hosted one. |
CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yanyang Li, Jianqiao Zhao, Duo Zheng, Zi-Yuan Hu, Zhi Chen, Xiaohui Su, Yongfeng Huang, Shijia Huang, Dahua Lin, Michael Lyu, Liwei Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based platform that assesses Chinese LLMs using a standardized workflow and a unique sampling strategy. |
| Outcome: | CLEVA evaluates Chinese LLMs on a standardized workflow and a competitive leaderboard with minimal coding. |
Model Extrapolation Expedites Alignment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLM alignment training require expensive computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a model extrapolation method to expedite LLMs’ alignment with human preferences by amplifying parameter changes based on a first-order approximation without any additional training overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a fully-trained model on leading benchmarks and significantly outperformed open-source models. |
Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human–Agent Interaction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing systems that use memory as an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage are often static and rely on experience-following tendencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance by adding context into the model's prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prompting and memory masking strategies in multiple scenarios. |
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | kNN-MT is a non-parametric method that uses nearest neighbor retrieval to translate out-of-domain sentences, rare words, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences to build an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. |