Papers by Zheng Xin

DialogQAE: N-to-N Question Answer Pair Extraction from Customer Service Chatlog (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing code sandboxes fail to provide accurate verification and efficiency under high-concurrency workloads.
Approach:	They propose a high-fidelity code verification system that provides sandbox feedback for RL training and evaluation.
Outcome:	The proposed system outperforms heuristic-matching baselines on LiveCodeBench and training stability on high-concurrency workloads.

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Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Xu Wang, Yufan Jiang, Mengliang Rao, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing work on question-answer extraction fails to integrate incomplete utterances from dialog context for composite QA retrieval.
Approach:	They propose a task where questions and corresponding answers might be separated across different utterances.
Outcome:	The proposed methods perform well on 5 customer service datasets and set a benchmark for N-to-N DialogQAE with utterance and session level evaluation metrics.

ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)

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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu

Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations .
Approach:	They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch.
Outcome:	Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models .

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Li Zheng, Xin Zhang, Shuyi He, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Jiang-Ming Yang, Donghong Ji, Zhuang Li

DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections.
Approach:	They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons.

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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton

CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools .
Approach:	They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets.

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Qian Lou, Xin Liang, Jiaqi Xue, Yancheng Zhang, Rui Xie, Mengxin Zheng

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing certified robustness methods for certifying input-specific text perturbations have shown promise in certifyling UTPs, but masking only adversarial words can eliminate the attack.
Approach:	They propose a method to certify a language model’s robustness against UTPs by using random smoothing.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves high certified accuracy under extensive masking and achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple settings.

Executing Natural Language-Described Algorithms with Large Language Models: An Investigation (2024.lrec-main)

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Xin Zheng, Qiming Zhu, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, creating new SOTAs and reaching human-level language understanding performance on a series of tasks and benchmarks.
Approach:	They propose to use an algorithm test set sourced from Introduction to Algorithm to assess LLMs' code execution abilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model can execute programs described in natural language as long as no heavy numeric computation is involved.

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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang

What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation (2023.findings-acl)

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.

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Wenhao Zhu, Shujian Huang, Yunzhe Lv, Xin Zheng, Jiajun Chen

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

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.

SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification (2026.acl-long)

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Xin Tong, Weidong Zhang, Jiaang Li, Haibin Chen, Shilei Liu, Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Yujin Yuan, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which lack content-aware, fine-grained noise detection.
Approach:	They propose a framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing pipelines on benchmarks and is 2.5x faster at inference.

PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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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

IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)

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.

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Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Haodong Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yichuan Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang

UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Instruction-tuned language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive services across various applications.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy by comparing their models to a set of benchmarks.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark covers 3,538 examples across nine tasks covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict.

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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang

AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses.
Approach:	They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy.
Outcome:	The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy.

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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

Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)

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.

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Xin Zheng, Jie Lou, Boxi Cao, Xueru Wen, Yuqiu Ji, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun

Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to improve the reasoning performance of large language models rely on intuitive instance-level feedback, which limits the reasoning capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability by using a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement.

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Xin Zheng, Zhirui Zhang, Junliang Guo, Shujian Huang, Boxing Chen, Weihua Luo, Jiajun Chen

Machine Translation

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.

DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Haoran Meng, Zheng Xin, Tianyu Liu, Zizhen Wang, He Feng, Binghuai Lin, Xuemin Zhao, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	DialogUSR is a plug-in and domain-agnostic module that empowers multi-intent detection for chatbots . a single user query triggers inquiries on highspeed train ticket price and weather of destination.
Approach:	They propose a dialog utterance splitting and reformulation task that splits multi-intent user query into multiple single-intention sub-queries and recovers all coreferred and omitted information in the sub-questions.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be used to split multi-intent user queries into multiple sub-queries . it can be trained in two stages and perform in-depth analyses on the proposed models .

Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods (2026.acl-long)

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Chenfei Liao, Wensong Wang, Zichen Wen, Xu Zheng, Yiyu Wang, Haocong He, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Xin Zou, Yuqian Fu, Bin Ren, Linfeng Zhang, Xuming Hu

Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.

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Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji

Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge.
Approach:	They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict.

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Xin Yuan, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu, Zheng Huang, Shujun Li

Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)

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.

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Haoli Bai, Zhiguang Liu, Xiaojun Meng, Li Wentao, Shuang Liu, Yifeng Luo, Nian Xie, Rongfu Zheng, Liangwei Wang, Lu Hou, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu

No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing solutions for visual document understanding lack granularity of document textlines.
Approach:	They propose a supervised pre-training program to leverage structural knowledge nested in document textlines to achieve fine-grained alignment between visual regions and texts.
Outcome:	The proposed system performs better on various VDU tasks in English and Chinese.

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Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu

Challenge:	Current methods for training Large Language Model agents rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates a critique and a policy to optimize the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop.
Outcome:	The proposed framework yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments.

OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)

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Haiquan Zhao, Xuwu Wang, Shisong Chen, Zhixu Li, Xin Zheng, Yanghua Xiao

QuickLLaMA: Query-aware Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases.
Approach:	They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness.
Outcome:	The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness.

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Jingyao Li, Han Shi, Sitong Wu, Chuanyang Zheng, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Hong Xu, Jiaya Jia

Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with capturing long-distance dependencies within sequences to deeply understand semantics.
Approach:	They propose a system that captures relevant information within a fixed window size and provides precise answers to queries.
Outcome:	The proposed system can read Harry Potter within 30s and accurately answer the questions.

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Xinyu Li, Kexi Chen, Jiajie Shen, Ying Zheng, Hong Lu, Jin Zhao, Xin Wang

DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix.
Approach:	They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance.

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Wei Fan, Wenlin Yao, Zheng Li, Feng Yao, Xin Liu, Liang Qiu, Qingyu Yin, Yangqiu Song, Bing Yin

Subtopic-driven Multi-Document Summarization (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to planning involve implicit planning or introduce explicit planners without systematically optimizing the planning stage.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end RL framework that enhances the planning capabilities of deep research agents.
Outcome:	Experiments show that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state-of-the-art results under a lower training budget.

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Xin Zheng, Aixin Sun, Jing Li, Karthik Muthuswamy

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Approach:	They propose a multi-document summarization model that assumes a set of documents to be summarized is on the same topic.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)

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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

Self-Evolution Learning for Mixup: Enhance Data Augmentation on Few-Shot Text Classification Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)

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.

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Haoqi Zheng, Qihuang Zhong, Liang Ding, Zhiliang Tian, Xin Niu, Changjian Wang, Dongsheng Li, Dacheng Tao

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Text classification tasks often encounter few-shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial.
Approach:	They propose a self-evolution learning (SE) based mixup approach for data augmentation in text classification which generates more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can generate more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training.

HypoNLI: Exploring the Artificial Patterns of Hypothesis-only Bias in Natural Language Inference (2020.lrec-1)

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Tianyu Liu, Zheng Xin, Baobao Chang, Zhifang Sui

BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent studies have shown that for models trained on datasets for natural language inference (NLI), it is possible to make correct predictions by looking at the hypothesis while completely ignoring the premise.
Approach:	They propose to derive adversarial examples in terms of the hypothesis-only bias and explore eligible ways to mitigate such bias.
Outcome:	The proposed models can be used to mitigate the hypothesis-only bias by using down-sampling and adversarial training.

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Ran Xin, Chenguang Xi, Jie Yang, Feng Chen, Hang Wu, Xia Xiao, Yifan Sun, Shen Zheng, Ming Ding

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored.
Approach:	They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods.

Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong

Continual Pre-training of Language Models for Math Problem Understanding with Syntax-Aware Memory Network (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited.
Approach:	They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning .
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster.

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Zheng Gong, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Jing Sha, Shijin Wang, Ji-Rong Wen

MMChat: Multi-Modal Chat Dataset on Social Media (2022.lrec-1)

Challenge:	a fundamental challenge in modeling math problems is how to fuse semantics of textual description and formulas.
Approach:	They propose a method to continually pre-train language models for improving understanding of math problems with syntax-aware memory networks.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms competitive baselines on four math tasks.

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Yinhe Zheng, Guanyi Chen, Xin Liu, Jian Sun

Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is important for developing engaging dialogue systems.
Approach:	They propose a large scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus that contains image-grounded dialogues from real conversations on social media.
Outcome:	The proposed model can handle sparsity issues in dialogue generation tasks by incorporating image features.

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Jiaxin Bai, Yicheng Wang, Tianshi Zheng, Yue Guo, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song

EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations.
Approach:	They propose a task of complex logical hypothesis generation to generate a complex logique hypothesis that can explain a set of observations.
Outcome:	The proposed model generates logical hypotheses closer to the reference hypothesis, but not better on unseen observations.

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Cheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Chunkit Chan, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Zhang

DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing frameworks for leveraging background knowledge of narratives are limited.
Approach:	They propose a framework to ground free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for narrative reasoning . their framework is based on a set of probabilistic probabilistic models that are grounded in the real world .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while providing interpretable evidence.

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Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng

Challenge:	Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk.
Approach:	They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression.
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks.

ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Zhipeng Chen, Kun Zhou, Beichen Zhang, Zheng Gong, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have excellent performance in evaluation benchmarks, but struggle in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs . they model chain- of-thoughting reasoning as multi-turn conversations to utilize tools .
Outcome:	The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on complex reasoning tasks.

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Zheng Li, Xin Li, Ying Wei, Lidong Bing, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data.
Approach:	They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space .
Outcome:	The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation.

MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)

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Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability.
Approach:	They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones.
Outcome:	The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods.

Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)

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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.

PretrainRL: Alleviating Factuality Hallucination of Large Language Models at the Beginning (2026.findings-acl)

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Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yejing Wang, Shilei Liu, Xin Tong, Yujin Yuan, Yongwei Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng

MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large language models suffer from factual hallucinations where they generate verifiable falsehoods.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning into the pretraining phase to consolidate factual knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly alleviates factual hallucinations and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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Jiahao Huo, Yibo Yan, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xin Zou, Zhihua Wei, Xuming Hu

Reefknot: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Relation Hallucination Evaluation, Analysis and Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in machine learning (MU) have enabled the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks.
Approach:	They propose to "reformulate" the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs by preserving only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses baselines that finetuned MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions.

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Kening Zheng, Junkai Chen, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Huiyu Zhou, Xuming Hu

IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing research focuses on object-level or attribute-level hallucinations, neglecting the more complex relation hallucinosities.
Approach:	They propose a comprehensive benchmark targeting relation hallucinations comprising over 20,000 real-world samples and a confidence-based mitigation strategy which reduces the halluciation rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets.
Outcome:	The proposed approach reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets, including Reefknot.

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Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song

Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts.
Approach:	They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms.

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Jiaxuan Wang, Yulan Hu, Wenjin Yang, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Lan-Zhe Guo

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a trajectory-level preference benchmark to evaluate judges' ability to distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in tool-integrated environments.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark evaluates how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios.

LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

CAME: Confidence-guided Adaptive Memory Efficient Optimization (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented.
Approach:	They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs).
Outcome:	The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings.

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Yang Luo, Xiaozhe Ren, Zangwei Zheng, Zhuo Jiang, Xin Jiang, Yang You

Beyond Itinerary Planning—A Real-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn and Tool-Using Travel Tasks (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing memory-efficient methods require second-moment estimates of the per-parameter gradients to maintain their performance.
Approach:	They propose to use memory-efficient optimizers to reduce memory usage by preserving second-moment estimates of gradients.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves fast convergence and lower memory usage across training tasks.

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Xiang Cheng, Yulan Hu, Xiangwen Zhang, Lu Xu, Lide Tan, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies on LLM performance on travel planning have shown that existing settings are limited due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' planning and tool-use abilities in real-world settings by collecting user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark evaluates agents' capabilities in real-world settings and shows that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities.

SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen

CORN: Co-Reasoning Network for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.coling-1)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data.
Approach:	They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments.
Outcome:	The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments.

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Xin Guan, Biwei Cao, Qingqing Gao, Zheng Yin, Bo Liu, Jiuxin Cao

CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing work uses two independent modules to model QA content and external commonsense knowledge graph (KG) Existing research uses two separate modules to create QA contextual text representations and relationships between QA entities.
Approach:	They propose a commonsense question answering (QA) model that uses two independent modules to model QA contextual text representation and relationships between QA entities in KG.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on QA benchmarks in the CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA datasets.

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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.

Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)

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Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang

SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks.

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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song

FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used.
Approach:	They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history.

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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin

Commonsense Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.

A Predicate-Function-Argument Annotation of Natural Language for Open-Domain Information eXpression (2020.emnlp-main)

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Mingming Sun, Wenyue Hua, Zoey Liu, Xin Wang, Kangjie Zheng, Ping Li

Open Information Extraction

Challenge:	Existing OIE (Open Information Extraction) algorithms are redundant and not reusable.
Approach:	They propose a pipeline where an Open-domain Information eXpression task provides a platform for all OIE strategies.
Outcome:	The proposed pipeline provides a platform for all OIE strategies.

TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang

Robustness in NLP

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.

DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)

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Zefan Cai, Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Jiaqi Han, Gang Yuan, Binghuai Lin, Baobao Chang, Yunbo Cao

DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology.
Approach:	They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data.
Outcome:	The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow.

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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li

ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)

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.

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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

R2H: Building Multimodal Navigation Helpers that Respond to Help Requests (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems.
Approach:	They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests .
Outcome:	The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks.

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Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaizhi Zheng, Xin Wang