Papers by Zhiyuan Li

131 papers
Butterfly Effects in Toolchains: A Comprehensive Analysis of Failed Parameter Filling in LLM Tool-Agent Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: emergence of tool agent paradigm has broadened capability boundaries of the Large Language Model (LLM) but effectiveness of tool agents limited due to parameter failure during execution .
Approach: They propose a parameter failure taxonomy to investigate parameter failure . they propose suggestions for standardizing tool return formats and improving error feedback mechanisms .
Outcome: The proposed model is based on a tool agent invocation chain and a mainstream tool agent . it shows that parameter name hallucination failure stems from inherent limitations .
Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent approaches to optimize communication topology rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards.
Approach: They propose a topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization.
Outcome: The proposed topology optimization framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on reasoning and code generation benchmarks.
MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on 1D text-related tasks, but lack 2D graph perception, a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures.
Approach: They propose to combine a cross-modal projector and a uni-modal adapter to enable an LM to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via a Q-Former.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baselines on tasks such as molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval.
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes.
Approach: They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior.
Outcome: The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior.
Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies suggest that pre-trained language models have gained rich knowledge during pre-training.
Approach: They propose to tune pre-trained language models with task-specific prompts to improve and stabilize prompttuning.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on zero and few-shot text classification tasks show that prompt-tuning improves and stabilizes prompttun-ing.
Joint Representation Learning of Cross-lingual Words and Entities via Attentive Distant Supervision (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for learning word and entity representations in monolingual settings are limited.
Approach: They propose a method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities that captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-linguistic inferences.
Outcome: The proposed method captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts.
AGGC: Adaptive Group Gradient Clipping for Stabilizing Large Language Model Training (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Adaptive group-wise gradient clipping (AGGC) is a new approach to stabilize training of Large Language Models.
Approach: They propose a method to stabilize gradient clipping by partitioning parameters into groups based on functional types and a time-dependent scheduling mechanism to balance exploration and convergence.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms standard LoRA and achieves 72.93% accuracy . it can be integrated into existing pipelines with negligible overhead.
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline.
Approach: They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations.
Outcome: The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace.
Repairing Catastrophic-Neglect in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Attention-Guided Feature Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Text-to-Image Diffusion models generate high-quality images from textual descriptions, but they often produce images that do not fully align with the input prompts, resulting in semantic inconsistencies.
Approach: They propose an automated repair approach to address catastrophic-neglect in T2I DMs.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 10.1%-16.3% higher Correct Rate in image generation compared to baselines.
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples.
Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for multi-hop reasoning assume that every relation has enough triples for training . however, performance drops significantly on few-shot relations .
Approach: They propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method that learns meta parameters from high-frequency relations that could quickly adapt to few-shot scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot scenarios on two public datasets from Freebase and NELL.
TritonBench: Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Generating Triton Operators (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Triton is a high-level Python-like programming language for building efficient GPU kernels.
Approach: They propose a TritonBench benchmark that provides a comprehensive evaluation of Tritonic operators on widely deployed GPUs.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that current LLMs struggle to generate efficient Triton operators on widely deployed GPUs aligned with industry applications.
Gentopia.AI: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for Augmented Language Models lack flexibility, democratization, and holistic evaluation.
Approach: They propose a lightweight and extensible framework for Augmented Language Models called Gentopia.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm.
Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing language representation models cannot explicitly handle coreference, which is essential to the coherent understanding of the whole discourse.
Approach: They propose a language representation model that captures coreferential relations in context.
Outcome: The proposed model can achieve significant improvements on downstream NLP tasks while maintaining comparable performance to baseline models on other common NLP task.
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios.
Approach: They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings.
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available.
Approach: They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer.
MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events.
Approach: They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets.
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks.
Approach: They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation .
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction.
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing text-guided image editing methods rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm . existing models lack such intermediate representations and Reasoning-then-action process .
Approach: They propose a "Decompose-then-Action" paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods in compositional editing tasks.
GLAF: Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission Network for Semantic Level Fact Verification (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing fact verification models lack fine-grained reasoning over key entities . GLAF uses local fission reasoning to capture latent logical relations between clues .
Approach: They propose a global-to-local fission and fissional network to capture latent logical relations hidden in multiple evidence clues.
Outcome: The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art on a FEVER dataset with a 77.62% FEVER score.
COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge probing studies focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) but ignore conceptual knowledge.
Approach: They evaluate conceptual knowledge of pre-trained language models by annotating 24k data instances covering 393 concepts.
Outcome: The proposed tasks evaluate pre-trained language models' conceptual knowledge of entities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts.
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult.
Approach: They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP.
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically .
Approach: They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE .
Outcome: The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field.
Adversarial Training for Weakly Supervised Event Detection (N19-1)

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Challenge: Detecting and identifying events is an important subtask of event extraction.
Approach: They build a large event-related candidate set with good coverage and apply an adversarial training mechanism to iteratively identify informative instances from the candidate set and filter out those noisy ones.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets.
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC).
Approach: They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty.
Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models to Discern Causal Links Across Modalities (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing MLLMs lack robustness in multimodal causal reasoning compared to their performance in textual settings.
Approach: They propose a novel multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning benchmark that leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs.
KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation (2021.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing language representation models (PLMs) cannot capture factual knowledge from text.
Approach: They propose a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained LanguagERepresentation which integrates factual knowledge into PLMs and produces effective text-enhanced KE with the strong PLM.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on existing pre-trained language representation models and improves their performance on various NLP tasks.
HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing static compression methods suffer from coarse-grained caching and high I/O overhead.
Approach: They propose a training-free dynamic compression framework that uses a sparse attention mechanism to categorize attention heads based on stability and similarity.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to 3 compared to the original model with a 224K context.
Judge as A Judge: Improving the Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Judge-Consistency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics cannot fairly evaluate the outputs of RAG models during training and evaluation.
Approach: They propose a method which prompts LLMs to generate different judgments based on various combinations of judgment dimensions and utilizes the judge-consistency to evaluate these judgments.
Outcome: The proposed method generates more accurate evaluations for RAG models across different RAG model and datasets.
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to unbalanced routing . some experts are overflow, where exceeding tokens are dropped, while others are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance.
Approach: They propose a top-k router that is unbalanced and uses a multi-gPU system to handle dropped tokens and padding.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses the top-1 router by 4.7% in terms of performance . the top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs .
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck.
Approach: They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance.
ReactXT: Understanding Molecular “Reaction-ship” via Reaction-Contextualized Molecule-Text Pretraining (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Molecular-text modeling is an emerging research field that aims to facilitate molecule-relevant tasks with a textual interface and textual knowledge.
Approach: They propose a new method for reaction-text modeling that uses three types of input contexts to incrementally pretrain LMs.
Outcome: The proposed method improves experimental procedure prediction and molecule captioning and offers competitive results in retrosynthesis.
LLMs Caught in the Crossfire: Malware Requests and Jailbreak Challenges (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have a high vulnerability to jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to test their security against jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on 320 manually crafted malicious code generation requirements, covering 11 jailbreak methods and 29 code functionality categories.
GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract information from evidence are unable to grasp relational and logical information among the evidence.
Approach: They propose a graph-based evidence aggregating and reasoning framework to integrate evidence from multiple pieces of evidence.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on a large-scale benchmark dataset.
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs.
Approach: They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.
Rethinking Jailbreak Detection of Large Vision Language Models with Representational Contrastive Scoring (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to a growing array of multimodal jailbreak attacks, necessitating a generalizable defense that is efficient for practical deployment.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses a lightweight projection to separate benign and malicious inputs in safety-critical layers.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables a simple yet powerful contrastive score that differentiates true malicious intent from mere distribution shift.
Neural Gibbs Sampling for Joint Event Argument Extraction (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event argument extraction cannot adequately model the correlation between event arguments and their roles.
Approach: They propose a Bayesian model to jointly extract event arguments using Gibbs sampling . they train two neural networks to model prior distribution and conditional distribution over event arguments .
Outcome: The proposed model can achieve comparable results to existing methods on two widely-used datasets.
Octopus: On-device language model for function calling of software APIs (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal for advanced text processing and generation.
Approach: They propose a framework to train on-device Large Language Models optimized for invoking software APIs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in API calling tasks while maintaining inference speed.
Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models.
Approach: They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines.
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools.
Approach: They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool.
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for concept expansion in MOOCs are inefficient because of the diversity of MOOC courses and rapid updates.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs that employs a two-level mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on nine real MOOC datasets and maintains competitive performance under different settings.
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Backdoor attacks can manipulate the output of deep neural networks and possess high insidiousness.
Approach: They propose a textual backdoor defense based on outlier word detection that can handle all the textual attacks.
Outcome: The proposed method can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations.
Enhancing Advanced Visual Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models’ advanced reasoning ability.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-modal in-context learning methodology to enhance LLMs’ contextual understanding and reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves SOTA performance among all visual reasoning tasks and achieves a 'higher level of accuracy' than previous models.
Play Guessing Game with LLM: Indirect Jailbreak Attack with Implicit Clues (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing jailbreak attacks primarily utilize scenario camouflage techniques, however their explicit mention of malicious intent will be easily recognized and defended by LLMs.
Approach: They propose an indirect jailbreak attack approach, Puzzler, which can bypass LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query.
Outcome: The proposed approach can bypass the LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query.
Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained models with parameters frozen are based on input-side adaptation, which requires thousands of API queries.
Approach: They propose to train a model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting to provide only the inference APIs for users . they argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 200x speed-up.
CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing EE methods do not model event characteristics from large unsupervised data.
Approach: They propose a contrastive pre-training framework for event extraction to better learn event knowledge from large unsupervised data and their semantic structures.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets on event extraction tasks.
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack.
Approach: They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples.
Outcome: The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks.
Reasoning in Flux: Enhancing Large Language Models Reasoning through Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that UAG not only enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but consistently outperforms several strong baselines with minimal computational overhead.
Approach: They propose an approach to guide LLMs onto an accurate and reliable trajectory by identifying and adjusting uncertainty signals within each step of the reasoning chain.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and outperformed strong models with minimal computational overhead.
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent .
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions.
Structure-Aware Language Model Pretraining Improves Dense Retrieval on Structured Data (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Structure Aware Dense Retrieval (SANTA) model encodes user queries and structured data in one universal embedding space for retrieving structured data.
Approach: They propose to use structured data and unstructured data to encode queries and structured data in one universal embedding space for retrieving structured data.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on code search and product search and conducts convincing results in the zero-shot setting.
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research.
Approach: They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource.
Outcome: The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs.
Differentiating Concepts and Instances for Knowledge Graph Embedding (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graph embedding methods encode concepts and instances as vectors in a low-dimensional space, ignoring the difference between concepts and instance.
Approach: They propose a knowledge graph embedding model that separates concepts from instances by differentiating concepts and instances.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on link prediction and triple classification tasks on YAGO dataset.
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos .
Approach: They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs.
Outcome: The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss.
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)

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Challenge: Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models.
Approach: They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain .
Outcome: The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice.
Mimicking the Familiar: Dynamic Command Generation for Information Theft Attacks in LLM Tool-Learning System (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to attack Large Language Model (LLM) tool-learning systems are black-box oriented and rely on static commands that cannot adapt flexibly to the changes in user queries and the invocation chain.
Approach: They propose a dynamic attack comment generation approach for information theft attacks in LLM tool-learning systems that mimics the familiar by inferring the information utilized by upstream tools.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baselines with +13.2% ASRTheft and can be generalized to new tool-learning systems to expose their information leakage risks.
Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing reasoning methods for sparse KGs are incomplete and lack of evidential paths to target entities makes multi-hop reasoning difficult.
Approach: They propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs to solve this problem . they use latent prediction of embedding-based models to make the model perform more potential path search over sparses .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on five datasets from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata.
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning .
Approach: a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path .
Outcome: Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness.
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models.
Approach: They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression.
Outcome: Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution.
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions.
Approach: They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude.
Memorize Step by Step: Efficient Long-Context Prefilling with Incremental Memory and Decremental Chunk (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to optimize LLM for long sequences for long documents are slow and consume memory.
Approach: They propose a method that starts with a small memory size and gradually increases it . they propose Decremental Chunk based on Incremental Memory (IMDC) which reduces chunk size while increasing memory size .
Outcome: The proposed method is faster (1.45x) and reduces GPU memory consumption by 23.3% compared to fixed-size memory.
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise.
Approach: They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner.
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge.
Approach: They propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters and build expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input.
Outcome: The proposed model can use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance.
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context.
Approach: They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions.
WebUIBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in WebUI-to-Code (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on webpage generation outcomes.
Approach: They propose a multi-view evaluation framework to evaluate MLLMs in four key areas: WebUI Perception, HTML Programming, WebUI-HTML Understanding, and WebUI to code.
Outcome: The proposed framework evaluates MLLMs in four key areas: WebUI Perception, HTML Programming, WebUI-HTML Understanding, and WebUI to code.
Multi-Channel Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn alignment-oriented knowledge graph embeddings suffer from structural heterogeneity and limited seed alignments.
Approach: They propose a multi-channel Graph Neural Network model to learn alignment-oriented knowledge graph embeddings by encoding two KGs via multiple channels.
Outcome: The proposed model is expected to reconcile the structural differences of two KGs, and thus make better use of seed alignments.
Exploring and Evaluating Attributes, Values, and Structures for Entity Alignment (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Entity alignment (EA) aims at building a Knowledge Graph (KG) of rich content by linking the equivalent entities from various KGs.
Approach: They propose to use an attributed value encoder to partition a Knowledge Graph into subgraphs to model the various types of attribute triples efficiently.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significant improvements over 12 baselines in cross-lingual and monolingual datasets.
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing.
Approach: They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability.
Outcome: The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing.
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen.
The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Event extraction (EE) is a fundamental information extraction task aimed at extracting events from plain texts.
Approach: They propose to specify data preprocessing, standardize outputs, and provide pipeline evaluation results to avoid these pitfalls.
Outcome: The results show that the evaluations are reliable and lack pipeline evaluations.
UERLens: Understanding Event Relations in Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing studies on event relation extraction (ERE) have focused on improving model performance.
Approach: They propose an interpretability framework for understanding event relations in large language models . they first construct a counterfactual dataset that includes causal, temporal, and sub-event relations .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves event relation extraction by leveraging internal features to train a lightweight classifier.
A Simple but Effective Pluggable Entity Lookup Table for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing pre-trained language models cannot recall factual knowledge of entities exhibited in large-scale corpora, especially those rare entities.
Approach: They propose to build a pluggable Entity Lookup Table (PELT) on demand by aggregating the entity’s output representations of multiple occurrences in the corpora.
Outcome: The proposed model can transfer entity knowledge from out-of-domain corpora into PLMs with different architectures.
Saber: Efficient Sampling with Adaptive Acceleration and Backtracking Enhanced Remasking for Diffusion Language Model in Code Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer advantages in parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling, but they face a critical trade-off between inference speed and output quality for tasks with strict structural constraints such as code generation.
Approach: They propose an efficient sampling algorithm that reduces the number of tokens unmasked per step based on the model’s evolving confidence.
Outcome: The proposed method improves Pass@1 accuracy by 1.9% while achieving 251.4% inference speedup.
Neural Collective Entity Linking (C18-1)

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Challenge: Entity linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, but existing methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently.
Approach: They propose a neural model for collective entity linking that integrates local contextual features and global coherence information to improve the computation efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed model improves its performance on five publicly available datasets and can be used to train on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and domain bias.
NumNet: Machine Reading Comprehension with Numerical Reasoning (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing numerical MRC models are weak in numerical reasoning, such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting.
Approach: They propose a numerical MRC model that integrates numerical reasoning into existing MRC models and achieves an EM-score of 64.56% on the DROP dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all existing machine reading comprehension models by considering the numerical relations among numbers on the DROP dataset.
Finding Skill Neurons in Pre-trained Transformer-based Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They find that after prompt tuning, some neurons encode task-specific skills . they also show that skill neurons are most likely generated in pre-training .
Outcome: The neurons are highly predictive of task labels after prompt tuning for specific tasks.
Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors.
Approach: They propose to use syntactic structure as trigger in textual backdoor attacks . they propose to achieve similar attack performance but have higher invisibility .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves almost 100% success rate but has higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses than the insertion-based methods.
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer.
Approach: They propose to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer . the authors propose to use text style to alter the style of a sentence .
Outcome: The proposed methods show that popular models are vulnerable to both attacks based on text style transfer . the results show that the proposed methods perform better than baselines in many aspects .
Chinese Relation Extraction with Multi-Grained Information and External Linguistic Knowledge (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Chinese relation extraction suffer from segmentation errors and ambiguity of polysemy.
Approach: They propose a multi-grained lattice framework for Chinese relation extraction . they incorporate word-level information into character sequence inputs to avoid segmentation errors .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in distinct domains.
Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for multi-hop reasoning are not able to evaluate their interpretability . a recent study found that many paths are unreasonable .
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models . they annotate all possible rules and establish a benchmark .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models in terms of performance and interpretability.
BehaviorSFT: Behavioral Token Conditioning for Health Agents Across the Proactivity Spectrum (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with proactive engagement, authors say . a blind clinical evaluation confirmed that trained agents exhibit more realistic clinical behavior .
Approach: They propose a training strategy using behavioral tokens to explicitly condition LLMs for dynamic behavioral selection.
Outcome: The proposed training strategy boosts performance on both benchmarks.
StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning.
Approach: They propose a virtual API server and stable evaluation system to assess the stability of large-scale real-time APIs.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks demonstrate the stability of the proposed system and its caching system.
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models capture factual knowledge from massive texts . but they are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance .
Approach: They propose to use open-world assumption to evaluate PLM-based knowledge graph completion models . they propose to convert each triple and its support information into natural prompt sentences .
Outcome: The proposed model is more accurate under the open-world assumption (OWA) this setting manual checks the correctness of knowledge that is not in KGs.
A Survey of Retentive Network (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the effectiveness of the Retentive Networks have not yet been conducted.
Approach: They propose a retention mechanism that integrates the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models.
Outcome: The proposed retention mechanism combines the inductive bias of recurrent neural networks with the parallelizable training advantages of attention-based models.
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for song generation fail to generate vocals with prompt-based control and proper alignment.
Approach: VersBand is a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality songs with prompt-based control.
Outcome: Experimental results show that VersBand performs better than baseline models across multiple song generation tasks.
LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing legal event detection datasets only cover incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data.
Approach: They present a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset . they use legal events as side information to promote downstream applications .
Outcome: The proposed method improves 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction and 1.5 points precision for unsupervised case retrieval.
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations .
Approach: They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models .
Outcome: The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset.
MoC: Mixtures of Text Chunking Learners for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text chunking are limited by text chunks and lack of domain-specific knowledge.
Approach: They propose a dual-metric evaluation method to quantify text chunking quality . they aim to generate a structured list of chunking regular expressions .
Outcome: The proposed method enables direct quantification of chunking quality . it substantiates the need to integrate LLMs into chunking process .
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents.
Approach: They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively.
UniTranSeR: A Unified Transformer Semantic Representation Framework for Multimodal Task-Oriented Dialog System (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on multimodal task-oriented dialog systems follow the pipeline to learn intra-modal features separately and then conduct simple feature concatenation or attention-based feature fusion to generate responses.
Approach: They propose a Unified Transformer Semantic Representation framework with feature alignment and intention reasoning for multimodal dialog systems that embed multimodal features into a unified Transformer semantic space to prompt inter-modal interactions.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the representative MMD dataset.
Dimension Reduction for Efficient Dense Retrieval via Conditional Autoencoder (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work reserves the principle dimensions of query and document embeddings for building more efficient retrieval systems.
Approach: They propose to use Conditional Autoencoder to compress high-dimensional embeddings to maintain the same embeddable distribution and better recover ranking features.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm achieves comparable ranking performance with its teacher model and makes the retrieval system more efficient.
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images.
Outcome: The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images.
Beyond ’Aha!’: Toward Systematic Meta-Abilities Alignment in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work has shown that outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) can incidentally elicit advanced reasoning behaviors such as self-correction, backtracking, and verification.
Approach: They explicitly align large reasoning models with three meta-abilities: deduction, induction, and abduction, using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model aligns models with deduction, induction, and abduction meta-abilities using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks.
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space.
Approach: They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks.
Outcome: The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models .
One Shot Dominance: Knowledge Poisoning Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge poisoning attacks against RAG systems require multiple poisoned documents or can only function effectively on simplistic queries.
Approach: They propose a more realistic knowledge poisoning attack that poisons only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements.
Outcome: The proposed attack achieves success by poisoning only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements.
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning.
Approach: They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling.
Outcome: The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios.
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles.
Approach: They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy.
Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test: Revealing Failure Modes of Advanced Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable mathematical problem-solving abilities, but their true reasoning shortcomings are often hidden.
Approach: They propose to leverage the rigor and methodological complexity of mathematical proofs as a diagnostic tool to expose hidden failures.
Outcome: The proposed model evaluation exploits the rigor and complexity of proof problems to uncover 10 fine-grained errors.
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas.
Approach: They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs.
Outcome: The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks.
Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM’s Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models have enabled them to tackle complex tasks such as mathematics reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method that modulates attention temperature dynamically to shift LLM's internal focus during reasoning, enabling a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused modes.
Outcome: The proposed method improves Pass@10 by 6.78–14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks.
Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Initial studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, but the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with real user participation remains unexplored.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent classroom simulation teaching framework that recognizes representative class roles and introduces a novel class control mechanism for automatic classroom teaching.
Outcome: The proposed framework can simulate dynamic learning environment for users with active teacher-student and student-studente interactions.
TSPO: Breaking the Double Homogenization Dilemma in Multi-turn Search Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve complex tasks through iterative information retrieval.
Approach: They propose a turn-level stage-aware policy optimization approach to solve this problem . they introduce a first-occurrence latent reward mechanism to allocate partial rewards .
Outcome: Experiments show that TSPO outperforms state-of-the-art models on Qwen2.5-3B and 7B models.
All Changes May Have Invariant Principles: Improving Ever-Shifting Harmful Meme Detection via Design Concept Reproduction (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for harmful meme detection only learn the combination of harmful elements and lack understanding of these implicit expressions.
Approach: They propose a method that detects harmful memes by replicating the design concept of malicious users.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves the highest accuracy with 81.1% and has slight accuracy decreases when generalized to type-shifting and temporal-evolving memes.
Intention Reasoning Network for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent years has witnessed the remarkable success in end-to-end task-oriented dialog system, especially when incorporating external knowledge information.
Approach: They propose a mechanism to model deterministic entity knowledge by using an intention reasoning network to obtain intention-aware representations of conceptual tokens.
Outcome: The proposed mechanism captures concept shifts and generates accurate responses on two representative multi-domain dialog datasets.
Know Thy Enemy: Securing LLMs Against Prompt Injection via Diverse Data Synthesis and Instruction-Level Chain-of-Thought Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language model (LLM)-integrated applications face security vulnerabilities from prompt injection (PI) attacks.
Approach: They propose a model enhancement method that synthesizes diverse training data and employs instruction-level chain-of-thought fine-tuning to enable LLMs to effectively identify and reject malicious instructions regardless of their source or position in the context.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines in three critical dimensions while maintaining utility performance without degradation.
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering.
Approach: They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text.
Outcome: The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings.
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents.
Approach: They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models.
HeteroRAG: A Heterogeneous Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Vision Language Tasks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Medical large vision-language models suffer from factual inaccuracies and unreliable outputs.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources.
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for relation extraction use knowledge graphs to automatically label training data . but, it suffers from the wrong labeling problem because not all sentences containing two entities can express their relations in KGs .
Approach: They propose a distant supervision approach to automatically label training instances . they integrate hierarchical information of relations into distantly supervised relation extraction .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale dataset.
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing MLLMs still struggle to achieve precise grounding in multi-image scenarios.
Approach: They propose a Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension to address this challenge.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in multi-image grounding tasks by 24.94% and surpasses larger 70B models.
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research.
Approach: They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers.
Outcome: Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement .
Event Detection with Trigger-Aware Lattice Neural Network (D19-1)

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Challenge: Event detection is a key part of event extraction, but there are two issues with word-based models in languages without natural delimiters, such as Chinese.
Approach: They propose a framework that can solve the problem of word- trigger mismatch . they also use an external knowledge base to model polysemous characters and words .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets and outperformed previous state- of-the art methods significantly.
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations.
Approach: They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations.
COAST: Enhancing the Code Debugging Ability of LLMs through Communicative Agent Based Data Synthesis (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing code debugging benchmarks focus on the Code Repair stage of the code generation process.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate the debugging abilities of large language models by emulating the human debug process.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms human-curated and GPT-4-generated training data, enabling 7B-scale LLMs to achieve comparable debugging performance to GPT-3.5.
Gradient-Based Adversarial Factual Consistency Evaluation for Abstractive Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Abstractive summarization models often produce inconsistent statements or false facts.
Approach: They propose an efficient weak-supervised adversarial data augmentation approach to generate factual consistency datasets by backpropagating gradients on token embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed model can make interpretable factual errors tracing on public datasets and is cost-effective.
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific domains.
Approach: They propose a framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding.
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs.
Approach: They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space.
Outcome: The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/.
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias.
Approach: They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases.
Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to expand course concepts in MOOCs suffer from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance.
Approach: They propose to use a boundary search method to search for new concepts via external knowledge base and then use heterogeneous features to verify the results.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on the datasets from Coursera and XuetangX.
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing pre-trained language models are typically trained with static data, ignoring that streaming data of various sources may continuously grow.
Approach: They propose to use function preserved model expansion to expand existing PLM's width and depth to improve efficiency of knowledge acquisition.
Outcome: The proposed model improves pre-training efficiency and performance over existing models on BERT and GPT.
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models.
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks.
Approach: They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios.
Few-Shot Charge Prediction with Discriminative Legal Attributes (C18-1)

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Challenge: Existing works on charge prediction perform well on high-frequency charges but are not capable of predicting few-shot charges with limited cases.
Approach: They propose an attribute-attentive charge prediction model to infer attributes and charges simultaneously . they propose to use discriminative attributes as the internal mapping between fact descriptions and charges .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on real-world datasets by more than 50% . the proposed model can predict the attributes and charges simultaneously .
LexRel: Benchmarking Legal Relation Extraction for Chinese Civil Cases (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Legal relations are an important analytical framework for dispute resolution in civil cases.
Approach: They propose a comprehensive schema for legal relations in civil cases with hierarchical taxonomy and definitions of arguments.
Outcome: The proposed schema shows that existing LLMs lack the ability to identify civil legal relations and performance improves on downstream tasks.
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering.
Approach: They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM.
Outcome: The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios.
Aggregation of Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Enhancing Answer Selection in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought prompting have facilitated significant breakthroughs for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical reasoning aggregation framework to address this problem . they propose dynamic sampling to adjust the number of reasoning chains .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble methods on complex reasoning tasks.
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency.
Approach: They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs.
Outcome: The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks.
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance .
Approach: They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance.
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities.
Approach: They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities .
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text.
LEGENT: Open Platform for Embodied Agents (2024.acl-demos)

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Challenge: Existing integrations of large language models and large multimodal models are limited . Existing platforms for developing embodied agents are limited and limited based on open-source software.
Approach: They propose an open platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs.
Outcome: The proposed platform surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks with its model training on LEGENT data.

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