Papers by Zheng Ye

CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)

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.

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Jingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li, Linlin Song, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Ruitong Liu, Xin Su, Zifei Shan

Syntactic Text Processing

Challenge:	Existing studies have focused on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, but the interpretabilty of these metrics has been neglected.
Approach:	They propose a reference-based metric that describes four aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-corrections, under-correcties, and over-corrects.
Outcome:	The proposed metric reveals critical qualities and locates drawbacks of GEC systems.

Experience-driven Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)

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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 .

GMSA: Enhancing Context Compression via Group Merging and Layer Semantic Alignment (2026.acl-long)

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Jiwei Tang, Zhicheng Zhang, Shunlong Wu, Jingheng Ye, Lichen Bai, Zitai Wang, Tingwei Lu, Lin Hai, Yiming Zhao, Hai-Tao Zheng, Hong-Gee Kim

Zero-shot Text Classification via Reinforced Self-training (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across NLP tasks . however, in long-context scenarios, they face high computational cost and information redundancy.
Approach:	They propose an encoder-decoder context compression framework that generates a compact sequence of soft tokens for downstream tasks.
Outcome:	Experiments show that GMSA outperforms baselines on multiple long-context question answering and summarization benchmarks while maintaining low end-to-end latency.

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Zhiquan Ye, Yuxia Geng, Jiaoyan Chen, Jingmin Chen, Xiaoxiao Xu, SuHang Zheng, Feng Wang, Jun Zhang, Huajun Chen

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods to learn from unlabeled data are difficult for zero-shot text classification tasks.
Approach:	They propose a self-training based method to efficiently leverage unlabeled data.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot text classification tasks on benchmarks and a real-world e-commerce dataset.

LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai

Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge.
Approach:	They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters.

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Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Binghai Wang, Senjie Jin, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Zhihao Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

CLEME: Debiasing Multi-reference Evaluation for Grammatical Error Correction (2023.emnlp-main)

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.

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Jingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Evaluating the performance of Grammatical Error Correction systems is a challenging task due to its subjectivity.
Approach:	They propose a method to evaluate GEC systems in multi-reference evaluation setting . they use consistent edit boundaries to eliminate bias caused by inconsistent edit boundaries .
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation metric eliminates bias caused by inconsistent edit boundaries on six English reference sets.

DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)

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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.

TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)

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Ming Zhang, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Shichun Liu, Huiyuan Zheng, Yurui Dong, Yujiong Shen, Shihan Dou, Jun Zhao, Junjie Ye, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang

MAssistant: A Personal Knowledge Assistant for MOOC Learners (D19-3)

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 .

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Lan Jiang, Shuhan Hu, Mingyu Huang, Zhichun Wang, Jinjian Yang, Xiaoju Ye, Wei Zheng

Empowering Large Language Model for Continual Video Question Answering with Collaborative Prompting (2024.emnlp-main)

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.

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Chen Cai, Zheng Wang, Jianjun Gao, Wenyang Liu, Ye Lu, Runzhong Zhang, Kim-Hui Yap

KidsArtBench: Multi-Dimensional Children’s Art Evaluation with Attribute-Aware MLLMs (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing VideoQA models struggle to adapt to new questions or tasks posed by newly available content.
Approach:	They propose a continual learning framework that fine-tunes a large language model for a sequence of tasks and integrates specific question constraint prompting, knowledge acquisition prompting and visual temporal awareness prompting.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves 55.14% accuracy on both NExT-QA and DramaQA datasets and 71.24% accuracy for DramaQA.

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Mingrui Ye, Chanjin Zheng, Zengyi Yu, Chenyu Xiang, Zhixue Zhao, Zheng Yuan, Helen Yannakoudakis

MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show impressive capabilities across visual–language tasks, but their capacity to evaluate artistic expression remains limited.
Approach:	They propose an attribute-specific multi-LoRA approach where each attribute corresponds to a distinct evaluation dimension in the scoring rubric.
Outcome:	The proposed approach increases correlation from 0.468 to 0.653 on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with the largest gains on perceptual dimensions and narrowed gaps on higher-order attributes.

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Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen

A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed .
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities.
Outcome:	The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech .

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Haojing Huang, Jingheng Ye, Qingyu Zhou, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li, Feng Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng

Towards Hierarchical Multi-Step Reward Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Teng Wang, Jiang Zhangyi, Zhenqi He, Hailei Gong, Shenyang Tong, Wenhan Yang, Zeyu Li, Yanan Zheng, Zifan He, Zewen Ye, Shengjie Ma, Jianping Zhang

emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) are vulnerable to reward hacking and require expensive, large-scale annotation of reasoning steps.
Approach:	They propose a reward model approach which evaluates both individual and consecutive reasoning steps from fine-grained and coarse-grounded level.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that the proposed model performs better than existing PRMs and is more robust than existing models.

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Ziyang Ma, Zhisheng Zheng, Jiaxin Ye, Jinchao Li, Zhifu Gao, ShiLiang Zhang, Xie Chen

AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing models for speech emotion recognition are not suitable for emotional tasks.
Approach:	They propose a universal speech emotion representation model that is pre-trained on open-source emotion data.
Outcome:	euphoria2vec outperforms state-of-the-art models and emotion specialist models . it shows consistent improvements among 10 different languages of speech emotion recognition datasets .

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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

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

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% .

TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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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

UNComp: Can Matrix Entropy Uncover Sparsity? — A Compressor Design from an Uncertainty-Aware Perspective (2025.emnlp-main)

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.

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Jing Xiong, Jianghan Shen, Fanghua Ye, Chaofan Tao, Zhongwei Wan, Jianqiao Lu, Xun Wu, Chuanyang Zheng, Zhijiang Guo, Min Yang, Lingpeng Kong, Ngai Wong

Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Deploying large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference remains challenging due to their substantial memory and computational demands.
Approach:	They propose an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages truncated matrix entropy to identify areas of low information content.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces the KV cache size to 4.74% of the original and achieves a 6% speedup.

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Yuming Yang, Wantong Zhao, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Huiyuan Zheng, Yang Nan, Yuran Wang, Xueying Xu, Kaixin Huang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Information Extraction & Text Mining

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.

Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-industry)

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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

Towards Quantifiable Dialogue Coherence Evaluation (2021.acl-long)

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.

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Zheng Ye, Liucun Lu, Lishan Huang, Liang Lin, Xiaodan Liang

Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization (2024.lrec-main)

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.

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Linzhi Wu, Xingyu Zhang, Yakun Zhang, Changyan Zheng, Tiejun Liu, Liang Xie, Ye Yan, Erwei Yin

DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Lip reading is a process of interpreting silent speech from visual lip movements . but lip reading in cross-speaker scenarios poses a challenging problem due to inter-speech variability .
Approach:	They propose to exploit lip landmark-guided visual clues instead of mouth-cropped images as input features.
Outcome:	Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces speaker-specific appearance characteristics in cross-speaker scenarios.

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Yuxiang Zheng, Dayuan Fu, Xiangkun Hu, Xiaojie Cai, Lyumanshan Ye, Pengrui Lu, Pengfei Liu

Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) with web search capabilities show significant potential for deep research.
Approach:	They introduce a framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents . they implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on open-domain research tasks by 28.9 points over prompt engineering and 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents.

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Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from statistical sequence predictors to sophisticated autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and sustaining multi-turn conversa-tions.
Approach:	They propose a system that instantiates a "Sentient Agent" that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the model in multi-turn conversations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework measures the agent's higher-order social cognition in multi-turn conversations.

HICD: Hallucination-Inducing via Attention Dispersion for Contrastive Decoding to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Xinyan Jiang, Hang Ye, Yongxin Zhu, Xiaoying Zheng, Zikang Chen, Jun Gong

Training-free LLM Merging for Multi-task Learning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations, producing outputs that are contextually inaccurate or factually incorrect.
Approach:	They propose a method that selects attention heads crucial to the model's prediction as inducing heads and induces hallucinations by dispersing attention of these inducers.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves performance on tasks requiring contextual faithfulness, reading comprehension, and question answering.

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Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Shanshan Ye, Hongzhi Yin, Yi Chang, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao

Everyone is unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems for Debt Collection (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks.
Approach:	They propose a training-free method for unifying different specialized LLMs into a single model using model-wise and layer-wise pruning and scaling.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing merging techniques and surpasses models fine-tuned on combined datasets in most scenarios.

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Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Qiqi Luo, Jin Guang Zheng, Zhixin Zhang

CausalMACE: Causality Empowered Multi-Agents in Minecraft Cooperative Tasks (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing models that assume users to be static, rational agents with fixed preferences fail to capture rich behavioral heterogeneity in real-world debt collection scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a public persona-enriched debt collection benchmark that highlights behavioral heterogeneity in negotiation.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models in realistic scenarios using 16 state-of-the-art LLMs.

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Qi Chai, Zhang Zheng, Junlong Ren, Deheng Ye, Zichuan Lin, Hao Wang

Challenge:	Existing work on multi-agent collaborative tasks in Minecraft is limited due to inefficiency and limited fault tolerance.
Approach:	They propose a framework that incorporates causality to manage dependencies among subtasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-agent cooperative tasks of Minecraft.

Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases (2025.acl-long)

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Rena Wei Gao, Xuetong Wu, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Mingrui Ye, Siya Qi, Carsten Roever, Yuanxing Liu, Zheng Yuan, Jey Han Lau

Towards Imperceptible Document Manipulations against Neural Ranking Models (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) can simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (N1) knowledge.
Approach:	They use large language models to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners, and then compare their outputs to real L2 learner data.
Outcome:	The proposed models replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human second language (L2) learners, with distinct influences from various languages.

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Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Zheng Ye, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Current approaches to detect vulnerabilities in neural ranking models often introduce noticeable errors and require a well-imitated surrogate NRM to guarantee the attack effect.
Approach:	They propose a framework called Imperceptible DocumEnt Manipulation to produce adversarial documents that are less noticeable to both algorithms and humans.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while maintaining fluency and correctness of the target documents.

MixEdit: Revisiting Data Augmentation and Beyond for Grammatical Error Correction (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Jingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li, Hai-Tao Zheng

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Various data augmentation strategies have been proposed to improve GEC models . high-quality parallel data for GEC is not as widely available .
Approach:	They propose a data augmentation approach that strategically augments real data by generating pseudo data.
Outcome:	The proposed approach significantly improves GEC models on English and Chinese datasets.

GRADE: Automatic Graph-Enhanced Coherence Metric for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (2020.emnlp-main)

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Lishan Huang, Zheng Ye, Jinghui Qin, Liang Lin, Xiaodan Liang

Natural Language Interfaces

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.

UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Rui Li, Liyang He, Qi Liu, Zheng Zhang, Heng Yu, Yuyang Ye, Linbo Zhu, Yu Su

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing query augmentation methods face knowledge update lag and hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) Existing methods face two key challenges: (1) separation of query augmented and encoding tasks, which hinders information sharing and introduces cumulative errors; (2) difficulty of selecting optimal augmentation strategy for different scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a unified framework for query understanding in RAG that integrates internal and external knowledge to enhance query augmentation and encoding tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms traditional query augmentation methods in five knowledge-intensive benchmark tasks in both closed and open domain question answering.

A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach:	They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.

ICA-Proto: Iterative Cross Alignment Prototypical Network for Incremental Few-Shot Relation Classification (2023.findings-eacl)

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Wangjie Jiang, Zhihao Ye, Bang Liu, Ruihui Zhao, Jianguang Zheng, Mengyao Li, Zhiyong Li, Yujiu Yang, Yefeng Zheng

CL2GEC: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Continual Learning in Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for relation classification suffer from the scarcity of manually annotated data.
Approach:	They propose a novel relation classification model that incorporates query representation into the encoding of novel prototypes and utilizes iteratively to achieve more interaction.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on two benchmark datasets.

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Shang Qin, Jingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Qi Li, Jinxiao Shan, Zhixing Li, Hong-Gee Kim

Syntactic Text Processing

Challenge:	Existing CGEC benchmarks for multi-disciplinary writing are limited . continual learning (CL) is a promising solution to handle domain-specific linguistic variation and prevent catastrophic forgetting.
Approach:	They propose a Chinese Literature Continual Learning benchmark to evaluate adaptive CGEC across disciplines.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark includes 10,000 human-annotated sentences spanning 10 disciplines, each exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and error patterns.

DopplerBAS: Binaural Audio Synthesis Addressing Doppler Effect (2023.findings-acl)

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Jinglin Liu, Zhenhui Ye, Qian Chen, Siqi Zheng, Wen Wang, Zhang Qinglin, Zhou Zhao

Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for binaural audio synthesis are limited in phase estimation, which is crucial for spatial hearing.
Approach:	They propose a method to explicitly address the Doppler effect of the moving speaker . it calculates the radial relative velocity of the speaker in spherical coordinates .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the representative WarpNet and BinauralGrad backbones in phase error metric and reaches a new state of the art (SOTA) it is compared with the current method which is limited in phase estimation .

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Jingheng Ye, Shen Wang, Deqing Zou, Yibo Yan, Kun Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ruitong Liu, Zenglin Xu, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen

mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning.
Approach:	They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks .
Outcome:	The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education.

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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

Visual Data in NLP

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.

RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)

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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.

Towards Mitigating Modality Bias in Vision-Language Models for Temporal Action Localization (2026.acl-long)

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Jiaqi Li, Guangming Wang, Shuntian Zheng, Minzhe Ni, Xiaoman Lu, Guanghui Ye, Yu Guan

Beyond Surface Features: Advancing Medical Vision-Language Alignment via Dynamic Evidence-Guided Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing vision-language models overemphasize linguistic priors, leading to modality bias.
Approach:	They propose a vision-language aggregation framework that mitigates modality bias in TAL by preserving vision as the dominant signal while adaptively exploiting language only when beneficial.
Outcome:	Experiments on THUMOS14 show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 3.2% mAP.

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Zixuan Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Xiaolong Liu, Yanchao Hao, Manman Zhang, Zheng Wei, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu, Ye Li, Fen Miao, Yefeng Zheng

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

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.

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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.

The Stackelberg Speaker: Optimizing Persuasive Communication in Social Deduction Games (2026.acl-long)

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Zhang Zheng, Deheng Ye, Peilin Zhao, Hao Wang