Papers by Zhou Xiao
Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaiyan Chang, Yonghao Shi, Chenglong Wang, Hang Zhou, Chi Hu, Xiaoqian Liu, Yingfeng Luo, Yuan Ge, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent training-based TTS methods, such as continued reinforcement learning, have surged in popularity, while training-free TTS approaches are gradually fading from prominence. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained sequential scaling method guided by process verification that integrates training-free TTS methods with other classical parallel scaling methods at the step level. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) show that training-free TTS methods can extend reasoning performance boundaries. |
Length-Induced Embedding Collapse in PLM-based Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In text embeddings from PLMs are essential for many NLP applications, but performance degrades on longer texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which mitigates the phenomenon of Length Collapse . they propose TempScale to ensure more consistent embeddings across different text lengths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on MTEB and LongEmbed by 0.94% on short and 1.10% on long texts. |
CFSum Coarse-to-Fine Contribution Network for Multimodal Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization models ignore the contribution of visual modalities . we propose a novel contribution network to consider different contributions of images . |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-Fine contribution network for multimodal summarization to consider different contributions of images for summarizing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on the visual and textual modalities. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
MotiveBench: How Far Are We From Human-Like Motivational Reasoning in Large Language Models? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models lack information asymmetry with real-world situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the human-like motivational and behavioral reasoning ability of LLMs with detailed, realistic situations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared LLMs with real-world scenarios on seven model families and found that the most advanced models struggle with understanding "love & belonging" needs. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Sun, null Ymyang, Xinyi Jiang, Yu Tian, Junnan Zhu, Jiang Zhong, Qin Lei, Jingwang Huang, Haoyang Zeng, Xinyu Zhou, Xin Xiao, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
Joint Multi-modal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis with Auxiliary Cross-modal Relation Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect-level sentiment analysis focus on extracting aspect terms and sentiment polarities separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal joint learning approach with auxiliary cross-modal relation detection for multi-dimensional aspect-level sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can obtain all aspect-level sentiment polarities dependent on the jointly extracted specific aspects. |
Order Doesn’t Matter, But Reasoning Does: Training LLMs with Order-Centric Augmentation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Logical reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to ensure accurate and coherent inferences. |
| Approach: | They propose an order-centric data augmentation framework based on commutativity in logical reasoning that randomly shuffles independent premises to introduce condition order augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs’ reasoning performance and adaptability to diverse logical structures. |
FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing syntactic similarity metrics are computationally expensive and inconsistent when faced with syntaktically dissimilar documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. |
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
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Jinghan Yu, Junhao Xiao, Chenyu Zhu, Jiaming Li, Jia Li, HanMing Deng, Xirui Wang, Guoli Jia, Jianjun Li, Xiang Bai, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Ma
| 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. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
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Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| 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. |
Inflated Excellence or True Performance? Rethinking Medical Diagnostic Benchmarks with Dynamic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) are limited in capturing key challenges of clinical diagnostic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic benchmark for medical diagnostics that provides a stress test of diagnostic robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a stress test of diagnostic robustness and veracity, helpfulness and consistency. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Multi-Path Transformer is Better: A Case Study on Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 12 WMT tasks show that shallower multi-path models can achieve similar or even better performance than the deeper model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a parameter-efficient multi-path structure to fuse features extracted from different paths to achieve better performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance with the same number of parameters than the deeper model. |
Each graph is a new language: Graph Learning with LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Natural language is used to describe graphs, but graph descriptions become verbose and only relying on attribute embeddings limits LLM’s ability to capture adequate graph structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-defined language for large language model that translates the graph into a corpus instead of graph descriptions and pre-trains LLMs on this corpus to adequately understand the graph. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms description-based and embedding-based baselines by efficiently modeling different orders of neighbors. |
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Yizhu Jiao, Priyanka Kargupta, Leo Luo, Yanzhen Shen, Bobby Zhou, Xianrui Zhong, Xuan Liu, Hongxiang Li, Jinfeng Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Vivian Hu, Xuan Wang, Heng Ji, Martin Burke, Huimin Zhao, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
Learning Dialogue Representations from Consecutive Utterances (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue Sentence Embedding (DSE) is a self-supervised contrastive learning method that learns effective dialogue representations suitable for a wide range of dialogue-oriented tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised contrastive learning method that learns dialogue representations suitable for a wide range of dialogue tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on five dialogue tasks on a few-shot and zero-shot datasets. |
A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Limao Xiong, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Xiao Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan
| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a CONfidence-based partial Label Learning method to integrate prior and posterior confidences for crowd-annotated named entity recognition models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on real-world and synthetic datasets compared with baselines. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
Dynamic Uncertainty Ranking: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Long-Tail Knowledge in LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that in-context learning (ICL) with retriever augmentation can help LLMs better capture long-tail knowledge, reducing their reliance on pre-trained data. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic uncertainty ranking method that accounts for the varying impact of each retrieved sample on LLM predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on question-answering datasets by 2.76% and 5.96% on long-tail questions that elude zero-shot inference. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
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Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
LiGen: Active Lipid Generation via a Molecular Language Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) can deliver cargos to tumor and immune cells . traditional approaches rely on experimental screening and expert judgment . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate lipid molecules efficiently and actively using deep learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on multiple cell lines and achieves a 30% improvement over the current methods. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
Not The End of Story: An Evaluation of ChatGPT-Driven Vulnerability Description Mappings (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data proves that ChatGPT performs no less than humans in text generation and knowledge Q&A. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ChatGPT to map vulnerabilities to common weakness enumeration (CWE), common attack pattern ennumeration and classification (ATT&CK) techniques and other classifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than human experts on many tasks, but it can't replace professional security engineers in vulnerability analysis. |
KRLS: Improving End-to-End Response Generation in Task Oriented Dialog with Reinforced Keywords Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogs (TOD) require a model to generate a response that optimizes for task-related metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a faster generation procedure that samples from independent next-word distributions and introduce a fine-grained reward function to help the model focus on learning key information in a dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on an offline task with 15% training time reduction compared to a standard RL algorithm using auto-regressive generation. |
Let’s Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations conducted on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion model which extracts aspects step by step and learns a denoising process that progressively restores them in a reverse manner. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. |
Leveraging Web-Crawled Data for High-Quality Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large language models are fine-tuned using expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use web-crawled data to train a language model on a smaller set of data . their results show that the model can convert web data with irregular formats into high-quality ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models larger than 32B and outperformed open-sourced models such as GPT-3.5. |
AutoMIR: Effective Zero-Shot Medical Information Retrieval without Relevance Labels (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain remains difficult due to the scarcity of relevance-labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate hypothetical documents . they also propose 'CMIRB' to provide a rigorous evaluation suite . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms HyDE in retrieval accuracy and generalization . it leverages large language models to generate hypothetical documents conditioned on a query . |
FocalPO: Enhancing Preference Optimizing by Focusing on Correct Preference Rankings (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Efficient preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become a popular approach in aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization variant that instead down-weighs misranked preference pairs and prioritizes enhancing the model’s understanding of pairs that it can already rank correctly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DPO on benchmarks like Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using mistral-base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B with the introduced hyperparameter fixed. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| 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. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
KG-TRICK: Unifying Textual and Relational Information Completion of Knowledge for Multilingual Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zelin Zhou, Simone Conia, Daniel Lee, Min Li, Shenglei Huang, Umar Farooq Minhas, Saloni Potdar, Henry Xiao, Yunyao Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that combining information from KGs in different languages aids knowledge Graph Completion and Knowledge Graph Enhancement. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence framework that unifies tasks of textual and relational information completion for multilingual knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies tasks of KGC and KGE into a single framework. |
Text-Attributed Graph Learning with Coupled Augmentations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on either the text attribute or the graph structure, neglecting the other aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines the strengths of both text-learning and graph-learning models in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on diverse datasets. |
Video Dialog via Progressive Inference and Cross-Transformer (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual dialog methods use RNN to encode the dialog history as a vector representation . a new method for video dialog is proposed, which progressively updates query information based on dialog history and video content until the agent think the information is sufficient and unambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which progressively updates query information based on dialog history and video content until the agent thinks it is sufficient and unambiguous. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to infer video dialog answers on large-scale datasets. |
BERT-MK: Integrating Graph Contextualized Knowledge into Pre-trained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods do not use graph contextualized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to model subgraphs in a medical KG and integrate it with a pre-trained language model to do knowledge generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on several medical NLP tasks . it improves on MedERNIE, and the proposed model is effective . |
TROVE: A Challenge for Fine-Grained Text Provenance via Source Sentence Tracing and Relationship Classification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated great potential in natural language generation, but their widespread adoption has raised concerns regarding content reliability and accountability. |
| Approach: | They propose a challenge to trace each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences within potentially lengthy or multi-document inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed challenge traces each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences . the dataset includes 11 scenarios covering QA and summarization in english and Chinese . |
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with instructions and preferences are conflicting . et al., 2023b) show that hybrid alignment training can outperform baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid alignment training approach based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods to achieve better collaboration between different alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline alignment training methods on summarization and dialogue tasks. |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
Topic-Oriented Open Relation Extraction with A Priori Seed Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open relation extraction give sub-optimal results on specific topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the built-in knowledge of large language models to maintain a dynamic seed relation dictionary for the topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach empowers better topic-oriented control over the generated relations and improves ORE performance along the five dimensions, especially on specialized and narrow topics. |
MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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Junjie Zhou, Yongping Xiong, Zheng Liu, Ze Liu, Shitao Xiao, Yueze Wang, Bo Zhao, Chen Jason Zhang, Defu Lian
| Challenge: | despite the growing demand for multimodal retrieval, there is a lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis method that leverages vision language models and open-domain images to generate high-quality data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 70 more datasets and can scale up. |
VISTA: Visualized Text Embedding For Universal Multi-Modal Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal retrieval are mostly text-oriented, which lack the capability to process visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-text embedding model VISTA which extends a powerful text encoder with the image understanding capability by introducing visual token embedds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance across a variety of multi-modal retrieval tasks in zero-shot and supervised settings. |
AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Jialiang Xu, Xiao Lv, Tianle Li, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 467k tables with supervision labels for four types of field metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the understanding capability of tabular models by incorporating distribution and knowledge information. |
HyperText: Endowing FastText with Hyperbolic Geometry (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, we show that HyperText outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses hyperbolic geometry to model tree-like hierarchies in natural language sentences by embedding words or ngrams in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
Emergent Modularity in Pre-trained Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained Transformers show that they learn fine-grained neuron functions. |
| Approach: | They examine the presence of modularity in pre-trained Transformers . they focus on Mixture-of-Experts, a promising candidate for modularity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure stabilizes at the early stage, which is faster than neuron stabilization. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
DeltaNet: Conditional Medical Report Generation for COVID-19 Diagnosis (2022.coling-1)
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Xian Wu, Shuxin Yang, Zhaopeng Qiu, Shen Ge, Yangtian Yan, Xingwang Wu, Yefeng Zheng, S. Kevin Zhou, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | X-ray and CT are the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment . however, due to the excessive number of patients, writing reports becomes a heavy burden for radiologists. |
| Approach: | They propose to use X-ray and CT to generate medical reports automatically . they evaluate DeltaNet on a COVID-19 dataset, where it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a COVID-19 dataset. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
MovieChats: Chat like Humans in a Closed Domain (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, open-domain chatbots are far from satisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified, readily scalable neural approach which reconciles all subtasks like intent prediction and knowledge retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms commercial systems replying on complex rules on static and interactive tests and shows that the results are remarkably good. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Do Large Language Models have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, but many are still English-dominated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use automatic corpus-level metrics to assess lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLMs in a multilingual context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves naturalness of LLMs in target languages without compromising performance on general-purpose benchmarks. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| 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. |
Landmark Embedding: A Chunking-Free Embedding Method For Retrieval Augmented Long-Context Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmentation work with chunked contexts, which leads to poor quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling using landmark embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. |
From Script to Stage: Automating Experimental Design for Social Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2024): multi-agent simulations based on large language models are a new paradigm for social science research . traditional experimental design relies on interdisciplinary expertise and technical barriers . Xiaoping and Xin eli argue that LLM-driven agents are unreliable for rigorous experimental design due to hallucinations and limited verifiability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-agent experiment design based on script generation . Script Composition, Script Finalization, and Actor Generation are the core phases of the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework lowers the barrier for social science experimental design and provides scientifically grounded decision support for policy-making. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
RoCBert: Robust Chinese Bert with Multimodal Contrastive Pretraining (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models have achieved SOTA results on NLP tasks but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks especially for logographic languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained Chinese Bert that is robust to various forms of adversarial attacks like word perturbation, synonyms, typos, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on 5 Chinese NLU tasks without sacrificing performance on clean testsets. |
Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods are not effective for machine translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model . they use random aligned substitution technique to bring words and phrases with similar meanings closer in the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation quality on low, medium, rich resource languages. |
Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy Planning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Optimal policy planning is a difficult task, authors say . many goal-oriented conversations require subjective strategies, they say - a problem in goal-orientated settings . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to perform goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
Diversifying Dialogue Generation with Non-Conversational Text (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models suffer from low diversity in open-domain dialogue generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to diversify dialogue generation by leveraging non-conversational text . they collect large-scale corpus from forum comments, idioms and book snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces significantly more diverse responses without sacrificing relevance with context. |
DrKGC: Dynamic Subgraph Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Knowledge Graph Completion across General and Biomedical Domains (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing triples in knowledge graphs . current approaches encode graph context in textual form, which fails to exploit its potential . |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to predict missing triples in knowledge graphs by leveraging existing triples and textual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns structural embeddings and logical rules within the KG and extracts a subgraph for each query guided by the learned rules. |
SimANS: Simple Ambiguous Negatives Sampling for Dense Text Retrieval (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Kun Zhou, Yeyun Gong, Xiao Liu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yelong Shen, Anlei Dong, Jingwen Lu, Rangan Majumder, Ji-rong Wen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sapping negatives from large document pool suffer from the uninformative or false negative problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to sample negatives from a large document pool using a new sampling probability distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to sample more ambiguous negatives on four public and one industry datasets. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. |
SFTMix: Elevating Language Model Instruction Tuning with Mixup Recipe (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Efforts to improve instruction tuning often focus on higher-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets, typically requiring data filtering with proprietary LLMs or human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Mixup-based recipe that elevates LLM instruction tuning without relying on well-curated datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following and healthcare-specific tasks with consistent improvements across LLM families and SFT datasets. |
Dual Context-Guided Continuous Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based paradigms have shown their competitive performance in many NLP tasks, but their effectiveness varies upon the model and training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual context-guided continuous prompt tuning method that integrates contextual information into the input input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing prompt tuning methods in the few-shot setting and can be used in many NLP tasks. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models via Group Preference Reward Shaping (2025.emnlp-main)
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Huaisheng Zhu, Siyuan Xu, Hangfan Zhang, Teng Xiao, Zhimeng Guo, Shijie Zhou, Shuyue Hu, Vasant G. Honavar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and sensitive to reward model quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages preference-based comparisons rather than precise numerical rewards. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that GPRS outperforms critic-model-free RL algorithms on RLHF and reasoning tasks. |
LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on aligning large language models with pre-trained datasets. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous analysis of a three-stage training pipeline using sequence packing, loss masking and increasing the preference dataset size in DPO to improve the performance of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| 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. |
LongWeave: A Long-Form Generation Benchmark Bridging Real-World Relevance and Verifiability (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zikai Xiao, Fei Huang, Jianhong Tu, Jianhui Wei, Wen Ma, Yuxuan Zhou, Jian Wu, Bowen Yu, Zuozhu Liu, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for long-form generation assess real-world queries with hard-to-verify metrics or use synthetic setups that overlook real-life intricacies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that balances verifiable and real-world assessment with Target-Anchored Evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model balances real-world and verifiable assessment with Target-Anchored Evaluation (TAE) it generates queries, textual materials, and anchors based on verifier targets within real-life scenarios . |
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Yuhan Song, Aiwei Liu, Chuhan Wu, Sijun Zhang, Wei Jia, Yuan Liu, Houfeng Wang, Zhou Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) excel at reasoning tasks, but struggle at elementary auditory perception. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components in a unified JSON format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities. |
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, but runtime code generation is limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset by exploiting large language models and publicly available scripting guides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. |
World to Code: Multi-modal Data Generation via Self-Instructed Compositional Captioning and Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final output into a Python code format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. |
Step-by-Step Mastery: Enhancing Soft Constraint Following Ability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In real-world scenarios, user instructions often contain soft constraints, which are semantically related and cannot be rule-based verified, posing challenges for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to construct datasets with high-quality outputs for instructions containing soft constraints automatically and use Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as the training method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the LLMs' soft constraint following ability by using direct preference optimization (DPO) and constraint quantity. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Text-based question answering (TBQA) has been studied extensively in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamically Fused Graph Network to answer questions requiring multiple scattered evidence and reasoning over them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results on a public TBQA dataset and produces interpretable reasoning chains. |
SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, but fine-tuning them on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a sentiment-aware language model (SentiX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks without fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks and can be trained with only 1% samples and better than BERT with 90% samples. |
ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhikun Xu, Ming Shen, Jacob Dineen, Zhaonan Li, Xiao Ye, Shijie Lu, Aswin Rrv, Chitta Baral, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Unlike other data augmentation methods, thoughts of words (TOW) views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts into pre-training texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time data-augmentation method called thoughts of words (TOW) that injects fine-grained thoughts directly into a next-word prediction task and teaches the model to understand how the observed next word is related to previous contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model hallucination by 10% and improves reasoning performance by 7% to 9% on average. |
Unveiling Language Competence Neurons: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Model Interpretability (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study explores how large language models capture aspects of human linguis-tic ability . large language model performance is limited by the mechanisms behind their performance . |
| Approach: | They employ psycholinguistic paradigms to explore neuron-level representations in language models . they found that large language models exhibit human-like abilities in three tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows human-like abilities in sound-shape association, gender association and implicit causality. |
SPS: Steering Probability Squeezing for Better Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Ziming Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Peinan Feng, Tongran Liu, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) training typically improves single-sample success rates but limited exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm that interleaves conventional RL with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) they propose 'Steering Probability Squeezing' to enhance exploration without external supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm improves Pass@k and improves exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories without external supervision. |
Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict characters' personalities have not been studied in the NLP field due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to predict characters' personalities that uses an exhaustive vocabulary of personality traits as targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is efficient and accurate and relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. |
Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance credibility and verifiability of large language models (LLMs) mainly focus on passage-level or paragraph-level references or citations, which fall short in verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides sentence-level citations in LLM-generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 90% accuracy in long-form question-answering tasks. |
StrucText-Eval: Evaluating Large Language Model’s Reasoning Ability in Structure-Rich Text (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured data has been central to corporate data strategies for decades . however, with the advancement of large language models (LLMs), there has been a significant shift towards the effective utilization of unstructured data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation data generation method to assess LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on structure-rich text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method supports 8 structured languages and 29 tasks, generating data with adjustable complexity through controllable nesting and structural width. |
Variator: Accelerating Pre-trained Models with Plug-and-Play Compression Modules (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chaojun Xiao, Yuqi Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful on NLP tasks but require huge parameter sizes and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method saves 53% computational costs using only 0.9% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2%. |
Exploring Layer-wise Information Effectiveness for Post-Training Quantization in Small Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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He Xiao, Qingyao Yang, Dirui Xie, Wendong XU, Zunhai Su, Runming Yang, Haobo Liu, Wenyong Zhou, Zhengwu Liu, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Large language models with billions of parameters are often over-provisioned . smaller models exhibit lower robustness under extreme low-bit quantization . |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-native, metric-driven post-training quantization framework that keeps uniform bit-width within each layer while mixing precision across layers. |
| Outcome: | LieQ reduces large accuracy gap observed for large language models with billions of parameters while preserving standard multiplication kernels. |
Chain-of-Quizzes: Pedagogy-inspired Example Selection in In-Context-Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful tool for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by mimicking the human learning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Quizzes framework that uses LLMs to answer a quiz to sift 'good' examples, combine them iteratively with the increasing complexity, and utilize a final exam to gauge the combined example chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on diverse reasoning datasets and shows that it is scalable and can be used in future research. |
GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | SQA is an emerging application of NLP in the medical, geography, and legal domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in geography domain at high school level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level. |
Teaching Language Models to Self-Improve through Interactive Demonstrations (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to improve performance on downstream tasks by prompting them to analyze and revise their outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that prompts large language models to analyze and revise their own outputs and uses this feedback to train the small model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LLaMA-7B's performance on math and reasoning tasks by up to 7.13%. |
Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Mixed initiative dialogue systems allow all interacting agents to initiate actions to control the interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt large language models as a drop-in replacement for fine-tuning on conditional generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompts improve fine-tuning and ground truth responses . the results show that generated responses are high . |
LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems (2024.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for augmented question-answering do not support researchers and developers to customize the training, testing, and deployment process. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit that features a wide selection of model training algorithms, evaluation methods, and deployment tools curated from the latest research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework trains and deploys 7B-models with the same performance as OpenAI’s text-ada-002 and GPT-4-turbo. |
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art. |
On Vision Features in Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is given to the quality of vision models. |
| Approach: | They develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in multimodal machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to learn translation from the visual modality on probing tasks and is compared with existing models. |
Collision to Cognition: Hash-Driven Graph Construction for Efficient RAG (2026.acl-long)
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Chuang Zhou, Zheng Yuan, Linhao Luo, Zhaozhuo Xu, Yilin Xiao, Junnan Dong, Siyu An, di Yin, Xing Sun, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been used for enhancing large language models with external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for mining efficient graph structures via hashing to enhance RAG . they adopt an inductive paradigm where global graph structure emerges from local hash collisions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while requiring no GPU resources or token budget. |
Latent Learningscape Guided In-context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select demonstrations based on surface-level semantic similarities fall short of identifying the most fitting ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that characterizes latent learningscape features of demonstrations and uses them to create more effective prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms leading models in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks showing an average increase in scores by 7.4 percentage points. |
Pay More Attention to Images: Numerous Images-Oriented Multimodal Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization approaches struggle with scenarios involving multiple images as input. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate multimodal summaries by integrating multiple images as input . they propose 'multimodal information evaluation' method that measures differences between generated summary and input based on multimodal input - and compares various methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method correlates more closely with human judgments than five widely used metrics . |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |
Enhancing Explainable Rating Prediction through Annotated Macro Concepts (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models learn user and item embeddings and generate reasons based on these embedds. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based explanation framework that leverages macro concepts to bridge the gap between the user/item embeddings and the recommendation reasons. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three datasets prove the proposed model is superior to existing models. |
ConFit v2: Improving Resume-Job Matching using Hypothetical Resume Embedding and Runner-Up Hard-Negative Mining (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model resume-job fit are sparse since job seekers apply to only a few jobs. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to enhance the encoder’s contrastive training process by augmenting job data with hypothetical reference resume generated by a large language model and creating high-quality hard negatives from unlabeled resume/job pairs using a novel hard-negative mining strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms ConFit and prior methods on two real-world datasets and achieves an average improvement of 13.8% in recall and 17.5% in nDCG across job-ranking and resume-ranker tasks. |
Taming Language Models for Text-attributed Graph Learning with Decoupled Aggregation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning text-attributed graphs neglect interaction between textual and structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates textual and structural information into TAG learning . they propose combining semantic aggregation and structural aggregations to improve learning a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art learning methods while requiring less resources. |
SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models lack topologyaware task scheduling mechanisms and model parallelization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-aware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters . they propose heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces job completion time by 1.2-1.3 and improves throughput by 1.12-1.25 . it also reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90 on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
LogicPoison: Logical Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, traditional RAG attacks are difficult to pose an effective threat to GraphRAg systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents into GraphRAG systems by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on GraphRAG systems in both effectiveness and stealth. |
POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversion (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Liu, Zhongyin Zhao, Le Tian, Haicheng Wang, Xubing Ye, Yangxiu You, Zilin Yu, Chuhan Wu, Zhou Xiao, Yang Yu, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training document conversion models with manual annotation are costly and time-consuming, and training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and improves on annotated documents. |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
Align-smatch: A Novel Evaluation Method for Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing based on Alignment of Concept and Relation (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation abstracts the meaning of sentences into a single-rooted, acyclic and directed graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a metric to evaluate concept alignment and relation alignment to improve Chinese AMR parsing evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust and compatible with concept alignment and relation alignment and more robust in evaluating arcs. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Yunjia Xi, Jianghao Lin, Yongzhao Xiao, Zheli Zhou, Rong Shan, Te Gao, Jiachen Zhu, Weiwen Liu, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized web search, but their integration is static and cannot handle complex contexts. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing research and analyze existing work from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can comprehend user intentions and context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |
Wav-BERT: Cooperative Acoustic and Linguistic Representation Learning for Low-Resource Speech Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn the transfer from speech to text are unexplored . how to solve the representation discrepancy of speech and text is unexplorable . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative acoustic and linguistic representation learning method to fuse and utilize contextual information of speech and text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on low-resource speech recognition. |
Order Matters: Investigate the Position Bias in Multi-constraint Instruction Following (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models struggle to follow multi-constraint instructions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify the difficulty distribution of constraints by a novel Difficulty Distribution Index (CDDI) they find that LLMs are more performant when presented with constraints in a “hard-to-easy” order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more performant when presented with constraints in a “hard-to-easy” order, compared with existing models with different architectures and sizes of parameters. |
Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring (2026.acl-long)
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Chuang Zhou, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Shengyuan Chen, Su Dong, di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhaozhuo Xu, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-centric retrieval framework that explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that HyperRAG outperforms baselines. |
Modality-Aware Integration with Large Language Models for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate multimodal knowledge in a modality-agnostic manner can be sub-optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-aware integration with large language models (LLMs) that leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to bridge a tight inter-modal exchange while preserving insightful intra-modal learning. |
Why Can Distillation Work with Limited Resources? A Systematic Study (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiao Hu, Xingyu Lu, Liyuan Mao, YiFan Zhang, Tianke Zhang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have driven reasoning performance . low-resource distillation can boost models' performance, but a framework is missing . |
| Approach: | They conduct a controlled experiment to find out why low-resource distillation can boost model performance . they find that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows more flexible reasoning, the authors show . they show that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
SADA: Bridging In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning via State-Aligned Distillation Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based in-context learning and parameter fine-tuning are dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models, but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert prompts into temporary adapter weights to bridge this gap by converting prompts to temporary adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on long-context language modeling and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency. |
Any Information Is Just Worth One Single Screenshot: Unifying Search With Visualized Information Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal retrieval models are lacking in visual representations of multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a visualized information retrieval paradigm where multimodal information is represented by a unified visual format called Screenshots for various retrieval applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a large dataset of screenshots from diverse sources . it is compared with existing models and lays a solid foundation for the new model . |
Enhancing Visual-Language Modality Alignment in Large Vision Language Models via Self-Improvement (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiyao Wang, Jiuhai Chen, Zhaoyang Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Parminder Bhatia, Taha Kass-Hout, Furong Huang, Cao Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual and language alignment depend on external models or data, leading to uncontrollable and unstable results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances visual and language alignment without external dependencies by incorporating an in-context self-critic mechanism that constructs preference pairs for tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves performance on 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jichao Wang, Liuyang Bian, Yufeng Zhou, Han Xiao, Yue Pan, Guozhi Wang, Hao Wang, Zhaoxiong Wang, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Shuai Ren, Lingfang Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training GUI agents on dynamic tasks are based on SFT or Behavior Cloning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates global trajectory insights directly into offline learning . they reconstruct diverse rollout candidates from static data and detect first failure point . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-horizon task completion rates and robustness compared to baselines. |
Natural Evolution-based Dual-Level Aggregation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models ignore asynchronous characteristics of event evolution, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Natural Evolution-based Dual-level Aggregation framework for TKG reasoning that incorporates asynchronous characteristics of event evolution into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates the asynchronous characteristics of event evolution for representation computation, thus improving prediction performance. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
Exploring Contextual Word-level Style Relevance for Unsupervised Style Transfer (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unsupervised style transfer lack fine-grained control of the influence from the target style. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that exploits the relevance of each output word to the target style . they pretrain a style classifier and train an attentional Seq2seq model to reconstruct input sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of transfer accuracy and content preservation. |
QUEST: Efficient Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification with Large Language Models on Commodity Hardware (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extreme multi-label text classification (EMTC) involves predicting multiple labels from a vast pool of candidates based on a user’s textual query. |
| Approach: | They propose a Quantized and Efficient Learning with Sampling Technique that uses a hash sampling module to reduce the data volume to one-fourth of its original size. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that QUEST outperforms existing methods while requiring fewer computational resources. |