Papers by Zhenyu Li
Negative Matters: Multi-Granularity Hard-Negative Synthesis and Anchor-Token-Aware Pooling for Enhanced Text Embeddings (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Text embedding models are used for various natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis, text clustering, and content-based information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthesis framework that leverages large language models to generate diverse negative samples with varying levels of similarity with the query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing existing synthesis strategies with synthetic data and when combined with public retrieval datasets. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
Large Language Models in Bioinformatics: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing bioinformatics, enabling advanced analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, and single-cell data. |
| Approach: | They examine the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) in bioinformatics and precision medicine by focusing on genomic sequence modeling, RNA structure prediction, protein function inference, and single-cell transcriptomics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are capable of predicting RNA structure and function and predicting single-cell transcriptomics. |
Enhancing Auto-regressive Chain-of-Thought through Loop-Aligned Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a powerful technique for enhancing language model’s reasoning capabilities, but generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose to align the steps of Chain-of-Thought reasoning with loop iterations and apply intermediate supervision during the training of Looped Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates accurate reasoning chains for complex problems exceeding training length, and improves performance of the auto-regressive model. |
AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, ML&DL methods fail to provide reasons for stock trend predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. |
| Approach: | They develop a method to train large language models to handle financial analysis tasks . they use AlphaFin datasets to compare performance with traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves stock trend prediction and financial question answering tasks. |
Multiple Knowledge-Enhanced Interactive Graph Network for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations models struggle due to lack of Common Sense Knowledge (CSK). |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to integrate multiple knowledge into the edge representations by integrating textual and visual CSK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets. |
M2PA: A Multi-Memory Planning Agent for Open Worlds Inspired by Cognitive Theory (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Xiaodong Li, Yuntao Liu, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jinlong Tian, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Open-world planning poses a challenge due to complex environments and task diversity . recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) lack the ability to connect to agents' experiences . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-world multi-memory planning agent that combines large language models with human-like multi-mesh systems to leverage their strengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art agents on 50 Minecraft tasks in zero-shot learning. |
JointCoder: Exploring Automated ICD Coding on Real-World Chinese EHRs with a Multi-Agent Framework (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated ICD coding systems face several fundamental challenges due to the limited availability of publicly available Chinese ICD datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese ICD coding dataset and a multi-agent framework to reformulate ICD as a joint disease-procedure coding task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world Chinese ICD coding datasets and 1.7B-parameter models. |
Maximum Score Routing For Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks impose an expert capacity constraint to ensure GPU-friendly computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a routing paradigm that dynamically allocates input tokens to top-k experts through differentiable sparse transformations, enabling scalable model capacity while preserving computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves lower training losses and higher evaluation scores at equivalent FLOPs compared to constrained and unconstrained baselines. |
Improving Attributed Text Generation of Large Language Models via Preference Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they produce unreliable content. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the attribution task as preference learning and introduce an automatic preference optimization framework that synthesizes attribution preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality than existing methods. |
SceneGenAgent: Precise Industrial Scene Generation with Coding Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on scene generation focuses on generating 3D scenes from textual descriptions . however, the task of generating industrial scenes with LLMs is complex and requires precise measurements and positioning . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent for generating industrial scenes through C# code. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLMs powered by SceneGenAgent exceed their original performance . the agent achieves 81.0% success rate in real-world industrial scene generation tasks . |
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiajie Zhang, Zhongni Hou, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Zhenyu Hou, Yilin Niu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | In recent years, significant advancements have been achieved in the development of long-context large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves models’ long-context performance and enhances their ability to follow short instructions. |
From What to Why: Improving Relation Extraction with Rationale Graph (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural relation extraction models are limited by entity type and textual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAtionale Graph to organize co-occurrence constraints among entity types, triggers and relations in a holistic graph view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines significantly and achieves state-of-the-art performance on document-level and sentence-level RE benchmarks. |
Not Just Plain Text! Fuel Document-Level Relation Extraction with Explicit Syntax Refinement and Subsentence Modeling (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to identify semantic labels among entities within a document. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction framework that captures and exploits instructive information by adding extra syntactic information into text representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three benchmark datasets. |
Take Off the Training Wheels! Progressive In-Context Learning for Effective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL) however, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment method that embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses vanilla ICL and achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. |
Vista-LLM: Decoupled Query-Guided Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Long-Video Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-video understanding is bottlenecked by the high cost of processing massive visual tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled framework for query-guided visual token pruning . their method reduces visual tokens by 90% and accelerates inference by 98% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces visual tokens by 90% and accelerates inference while retaining over 98% of baseline performance on average. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
Enhancing Chinese Pre-trained Language Model via Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained Chinese language models ignore linguistics knowledge to learn representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-free enhancement module to integrate linguistics knowledge into Chinese pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Chinese pre-trained language models on 6 tasks with 10 benchmark datasets. |
Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) grows with model size and pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine quality filtering, conditional routing, and cooperative peer teaching to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that QR-Distill is superior to traditional methods. |
FocusLLM: Precise Understanding of Long Context by Dynamic Condensing (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Li, Yike Zhang, Tengyu Pan, Yutao Sun, Zhichao Duan, Junjie Fang, Rong Han, Zixuan Wang, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensed process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM by distilling crucial information from long sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extends the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing it to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. |
E-Bench: Towards Evaluating the Ease-of-Use of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | E-Bench is a framework for easy-to-use research on large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the ease-of-use of large language models and construct an E-Bench . they simulate human use from synonymous and typographical perturbations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to resist synonymous expressions and typos and improves performance. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
Harnessing Large Language Models for Disaster Management: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, including their emerging role in mitigating threats to human life, infrastructure, and the environment during natural disasters. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios to provide valuable insights for the research community and practitioners . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Label-Sensitive Reward for Natural Language Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance, but objective mismatch issues hinder RLHF learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning framework enhanced with Label-sensitive reward to enhance LLMs' alignment and generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on five diverse models across eight tasks. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency (2023.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Lei, Herun Wan, Wenqian Zhang, Shangbin Feng, Zilong Chen, Jundong Li, Qinghua Zheng, Minnan Luo
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify bots rely on text or networks alone . text-graph interactions and semantic consistency are essential improvements to combat bot evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine text-graph interaction and semantic Consistency to model Twitter bots' behavior based on attention weights and a text-graphic interaction module to enable information exchange across modalities in the learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely adopted datasets and the results are consistent with previous work. |
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models are evaluated on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize OpenIE over unseen target domains with different data distributions from source training domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the previous methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings by 6.0% in F1 score absolutely. |
KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a political perspective detection approach that leverages news text to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporates textual cues as paragraph-level labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
From Cross-Task Examples to In-Task Prompts: A Graph-Based Pseudo-Labeling Framework for In-context Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform novel tasks without parameter updates by conditioning on a few input-output examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-efficient two-stage pipeline that reduces reliance on LLMs for data labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline reduces reliance on LLMs for data labeling . it leverages readily available cross-task examples to prompt an LLM and pseudo-label a small set of target task instances. |
TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for On-Policy LLM RL typically train a separate process reward model, which suffers from distribution mismatch and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that directly incorporates on-policy tree search for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that tree search achieves superior performance compared to traditional ChainRL. |
Submodular-based In-context Example Selection for LLMs-based Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on the role of well-chosen examples in in-context learning . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple translational factors for in-context example selection by using monotone submodular function maximization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms random selection and robust single-factor baselines across various NLP tasks. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs can confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering "I don't know". |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework that fuses evidence from multiple sources and iteratively revises the hallucinous content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. |
Strengthened Symbol Binding Makes Large Language Models Reliable Multiple-Choice Selectors (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) are a critical area of research in the study of Large Language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient SFT algorithm for MCQs, termed Point-wise Intelligent Feedback, which constructs negative instances by randomly combing the incorrect option contents with all candidate symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly reduces the model’s selection bias by improving its MCSB capability. |
Document-level Relation Extraction with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on extracting relations from single sentence . document-level relation extraction requires a comprehension of the whole document . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based model with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (DHG) for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used datasets. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. |
Multimodal Neural Machine Translation: A Survey of the State of the Art (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) is a task that aims to translate text into the target language using neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate other modalities with textual data to enhance translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to integrate visual modality with textual data to improve translation quality. |
Metagent-P: A Neuro-Symbolic Planning Agent with Metacognition for Open Worlds (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Yuntao Liu, Xiaodong Li, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Jinlong Tian, Zhenyu Li, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promising potential through their world knowledge and language processing capabilities in open-world planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the world knowledge of large language models, symbolic reasoning capabilities of cognitive architectures, and metacognition to improve experience utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in Minecraft and reduces the average replanning counts by 34% and exceeds the human success rate by 18.96%. |
Bio-RFX: Refining Biomedical Extraction via Advanced Relation Classification and Structural Constraints (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting structured data from unstructured texts neglect unique features of the biomedical literature, such as ambiguous entities and nested proper nouns. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages sentence-level relation classification before entity extraction to tackle entity ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in both NER and RE tasks and has competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned baselines for RE. |